


chasing after our ends

by M_arahuyo



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - No Powers, F/F, Innkeeper AU, Light Angst, Pining, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-07 20:24:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 29,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14678820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_arahuyo/pseuds/M_arahuyo
Summary: It wasn’t supposed to play out like this. In her mind, she had a clear-cut image of a warning successfully delivered and justice hammering down on Cadmus like the curled hand of God. People saved and still with their families. The streets of Seattle back to its frail sense of peace.Driving in the middle of the night headed to nowhere was never part of that clear-cut image.***Kara Danvers is fired from CatCo after a good deed that does more harm than good. Solace comes in the form of a sleepy, seaside town and a lovely innkeeper who doesn't wear a ring on her finger.





	1. the means to an end

**Author's Note:**

> ok i said im supercorp trash n i still am, but i gave birth to a fic child and i have to nurture it as a Good Parent
> 
> i had a lot of fun writing this and i hope you guys have fun reading it!! shouts to my dear friend Cold who pushed n supported me into writing this, n also for being an a+ beta. love u angel :')
> 
> jus in case, mike matthews is mon-el. i figured it would better fit the au if i went w his human (though canon fake) name
> 
> title and opening lines are from Moon River which, i am pleased to know, melissa benoist actually sang in that one the flash episode
> 
> enjoy!!

_My dream maker_

_Heartbreaker_

_Wherever you're going I'm going the same_

***

 

It’s a 6-minute coverage that plays out like a 2-hour movie in Kara’s head. There’s a fire. People scampering around in blind panic and blinder rage as cops in riot gear brandish their batons and hold their riot shields like scuffed castle walls. A brief clip plays of a man in a khaki-colored jacket and blood on his temple hurling rocks at the windows of the police station. The way he pitches his arm far behind him then sends it forward in a swift whip seems near-effortless, and gives Kara the idea that maybe he was in baseball in middle or high school, or is still. A police officer tackles him to the ground.

Leslie Willis reports with a stone face and an expertly modulated voice despite the shock of the situation. She’s a news anchor for a reason. “Reports so far are that 22 people are injured, six of which are police officers. Authorities have arrested 18 of the rioters and the district attorney is looking to press charges.

“The incident is believed to have stemmed from when CatCo reporter,” and Leslie’s face twitches just briefly here, so quickly that Kara thinks she’s the only one who catches it, “ _Kara Danvers_ posted a blog entry on her personal blog with details on the most recent string of disappearances she deemed _abductions_ in the city. The blog entry implicates the terrorist group Cadmus and their anti-immigrant agenda while also insinuating that the relevant authorities are willfully ignoring to look into the obvious links…”

“Turn it up,” Snapper barks and someone does, Kara doesn’t see who, because all she sees is her face on the TV screens on top of a flashing banner that says _CatCo reporter incites panic._

“ _Kara Danvers, known for her investigative reporting and righteous personal beliefs_ …”

All eyes in the vicinity are on her. The sensation pins her to her spot and she doesn’t move until Snapper calls her to his office. He speaks to her in an uncharacteristically blank voice, looking through her instead of at her. He calls her _Ms Danvers_ throughout the whole ordeal. Not one snappy comment. Not one passive-aggressive jibe. At the end of it all, Kara finds herself moving all her things from her desk to a box and carries the weight of stares on her shoulders as she takes the elevator down to the lobby.

 

Alex is the first to visit her. She’s sporting the faint smudge of a bruise on her cheek that looks like it only intends to bloat to terrific proportions from there on out. She doesn’t look at Kara just yet. Kara, who is curled up on a couch in frayed sweats and her childhood blanket, watching another run of the outrage at the police station in the news. Alex watches with her.

“Are you hurt?” Kara asks when the segment shifts to one about gas prices and an angry interview with a cab driver. Alex’s feet pad on the carpets. Kara has given her neck a knot the size of her fuck up with how she keeps refusing to turn to her sister.

“Just a bruise,” Alex says blankly. She sets something down on the center table before sitting opposite to Kara. “And a couple of hits to my image for being related to the reporter that ruined the force, but I’ll live.”

Kara is numb enough to be able to ignore the comment. Numb enough to be able to say, “my email is full of creative insults and death threats,” without even needing to blink.

They’re quiet for a time. Alex fumbles with whatever she’s brought and Kara turns to see it’s a carton of pizza. Hawaiian. Alex is helping herself to a slice. The bruise on her cheek shines mauve in the apartment’s light and Kara wonders if it’s a fist that did it. Maybe a bat. Maybe even one of the rocks the man in the khaki jacket had been skillfully pitching at the police station. She thinks to ask. “How did that happen?”

“I was pinning a guy down to handcuff. He was strong. Hit me with his elbow.” Alex pushes the carton toward her and Kara reaches for a slice, though she’s far from hungry. From feeling anything, really. “What were you thinking?”

She ends up dropping the slice back into the carton. She wipes her fingers on her blanket. “That I was doing the right thing.”

Alex’s expression softens by slow, slow degrees. Her free hand hovers between them and Kara watches her debate between pulling it back and reaching out, fingers curling and uncurling as slowly as her mouth opens and closes without a sound.

She closes her hand and pulls it back. “It’s always _the right thing_ with you, and never the smart thing.”

Kara accepts that. She reaches for her slice again and crams it into her mouth without saying anything else.

 

Leslie tells her much the same thing as Alex did come evening. “ _Why the hell did you do it?_ ”

“Someone had to do something. People were probably being abducted and even _killed_ , Leslie.”

“ _Yeah—_ probably _being abducted and even killed, precisely. That’s_ probably _the reason Snapper didn’t want it published in the first place_.  _News doesn’t live off of probably’s._ ”

Kara peels off the bandage on her palm to stare at the crusted cut there, stretched out like an errant bolt of lightning. She went to the grocery store some time after Alex left. Alex warned her not to go strutting around the streets in the mean time before she went, doing that threatening thing with her face that never really worked on Kara, even when they were kids. Kara had never been one to listen too, anyway. In the store a woman recognized her and sneered, “oh, you’re that conspiracy theorist bimbo reporter,” and in her shock, she dropped the bottle of wine she’d been looking at.

Wine splashed up all over her shoes and in a panic, she tried picking the pieces up. She was ushered away by an attendant in the aisle. She paid for the wine with a bleeding hand.

“I wasn’t thinking,” she murmurs. Leslie’s bark of laughter fires out of the speakers of her phone.

“ _I know, it’s always like that with you. You don’t think things through. God, I am so glad I broke up with you_.”

“Even more glad now, I bet.”

Other people’s self-deprecation has never sat well with Leslie. If eyerolls had a sound, hers, Kara figures, would be loud on her speakers. “ _Take a break. Get outta here._ Find yourself _or whatever the hell. Just let the news make its rounds for now, it’ll die down_.”

Kara sticks on a fresh bandage and sits staring at her hand for a second. Nearby, her laptop pings with another email notification. The subject line reads _HEY FEARMONGERING BITCH_ and she goes back to staring at her palm.

“ _Hey_.”

“Yeah, I heard you.”

“ _You’ll be alright, Kar. Just take a time out to think about what you did_.”

Kara laughs without humor. It’s not Leslie’s ideal reaction judging by how quiet she is on the line.

* * *

 

It wasn’t supposed to play out like this. In her mind, she had a clear-cut image of a warning successfully delivered and justice hammering down on Cadmus like the curled hand of God. People saved and still with their families. The streets of Seattle back to its frail sense of peace.

Driving in the middle of the night headed to nowhere was never part of that clear-cut image, but there she is in her car with duffels on the backseat and knuckles white on the steering wheel. She’d called Alex after Leslie hung up in the hopes of getting talked out of it, and maybe getting a pep talk from her strong-headed sister, but Alex had only agreed.

“ _How about mom’s for a few weeks? She’ll take care of you_.”

But Kara didn’t want just a few weeks, and she could take care of herself.

J’onn had told her about it once over game night, around the time his father’s Alzheimer’s was only starting out and wrecking a havoc in his skull. Four days was the longest leave the SPD was willing to give him but it was good enough, he said, and where the two of them went, he and his father found some strange sense of peace. M’yrnn returned to the city a lot less angry.

Kara couldn’t see the shape of Seattle on the rearview anymore. Behind and before her there’s only the highway and the horizon of the evening above it.

It’s a four hour drive. On the second she pulls over for gas and a quick bathroom break, and being herself, makes the mistake of checking her emails. She’s received 17 new emails in the span of two hours alone and gives Alex an update on where she is and how she’s doing. It’s past midnight, but Alex texts back.

On the third, it starts to rain. On the fourth, it’s only gotten a lot heavier and Kara’s teeth grit with her windshield wipers.

She can feel water soaking her socks and mud on the hems of her jeans when she stomps out of her car. She tracks all that wetness and all that mud with her into the inn with a heaving charge worthy of a draft ox. Water clouds her glasses and her vision. At the receiving room there’s a counter, and behind the counter the attendant’s shape perks up at her entry.

“Hi—thanks, thank you,” she says weakly as the man shuffles over in a hurry to help her with her bags. He’s taller than her but only a little, and his paleness is made all the more stark backdropped by the earthy colors of the inn’s floors and walls. Her shoes squeak wetly on the floor. The attendant ducks his head at her in a wordless show of welcome and ushers her forward.

“And you must be…”

“Kara,” she says, peering over the counter. She watches him flip open a book. When she’s given a look, she adds, albeit hesitantly, “Danvers.”

“You called earlier this evening,” the attendant says with no lilt of recognition or care in his voice. Even on his face, when he looks up. “Indefinite stay.”

It’s not a question so Kara says nothing. Still looking directly at her, the attendant twists his body to reach for the key hooks behind him and hands her a key. A singular bronze one with a frayed tag, _5_.

He helps her with her bags, only slightly frowning at the mess she drags around as they ascend the stairs to the rooms. It’s a small establishment. Three floors from what she could make out of her hurried dash inside to get out of the rain. Kara means to tip him for his troubles and for the mess he’ll no doubt be cleaning up, but he shuts the door as soon as he’s deposited the bags without much of a farewell.

Kara leaves them by the door. Most her life condensed into two duffels that doesn’t somehow include an umbrella. The clock on the bedside table glares with a red _2:17am_ and Kara almost knocks it over when she throws herself face first onto the bed.

The sheets are the chaffy kind bought from Costco and crumple noisily under Kara’s elbow. It’s there on the quaint, twin-sized bed and cheap sheets and the smell of a place so away from home that the day’s events catch up to her with the fury of a roof caving in over her head.

Her phone pings with another notification. Maybe a nasty tweet, another email, one more scantily-crafted death threat. She crumbles and lets herself cry.

* * *

 

She’s woken up by a draft through the gap on the window where it’s stuck and won’t close all the way. She unlimbers the curtains to spread over the spot. Her bedside clock reads 6:28am.

Breakfast is in a greasy little diner overlooking a gray-looking beach. The people are peaceful yet chatty things, exchanging pleasantries and comments about the soupy clouds that trample over the sun but otherwise mind their own business. Kara keeps her head down and her mouth busy around her clubhouse. Only once does a waitress give her a curious, “do I know you from somewhere?” and she tightly says no.

The sun still isn’t out and the gravel underfoot is still wet when she drives back to the inn. Now, she could get a good look at it: The Legionnaire, written in classic serif atop the entrance. She was right about the three floors thing.

“Good morning,” someone says just as she’s pulled open the front door. She stops. Blinks owlishly but manages a smile to the back of the woman busily writing something on the slate off to the side.

“Good morning.”

“Checking in?” The woman pauses this time to regard her. Her voice is husky like how Kara’s gets after a long pull of whisky. Her hair is dark, and everything about her, from her eyes to her skin to the brown sweater snug along the curve of her waist is earthy. She smiles, and even the way it makes her eyes shine reminds Kara of rich, dark soil.

“No,” Kara answers belatedly, catching herself. Her cheeks feel warm. “I went for breakfast. Checked in last ni—this morning.”

The woman nods slightly and resumes whatever she’s doing. The chalk moves in swift loops, making dull little _tack-tacks_. “We have a restaurant, too,” she says with something like a tease and a quick glance. “It’s right here.”

And so it is. Kara cants her whole body to look and spies a window with an elderly man eating on a table alone. It’s a separate building with a makeshift connection to the inn, an open corridor linking two entryways made to look like a bridge. Kara pinks.

“Sorry, I—I didn’t know. It’s my first time here.”

“We have eggs benedict for breakfast special but I suppose you won’t be wanting it now,” the woman says. It’s a joke, though, and while Kara continues to flush she laughs anyway. The woman drops the chalk and claps her hands relatively clean of dust. “I’m Imra,” she offers as an introduction.

Kara is a creature of warmth, this much is known. She thrives on hugs and kisses and lives in a world where people reach for people with all their goodness shining through. So it’s automatic, how she reaches out for a handshake. “Kara. You, ah, you own the place?”

Imra, though looking surprised by the formality, receives Kara’s hand. Her grip is gentle. Her hand is rough and is nothing like what Kara expects from a woman of her appearance and gait. “Kara,” Imra says, trying the name out, and tangled with her accent and her voice it sounds like a work of art. She smiles. “I do. The restaurant, too. You checked in this morning?”

“Around 2, yeah.” 

“Ah, the _mud tracker_.” Kara reddens again. That’s all she’s done around Imra so far and she needs to stop. Imra only laughs though, waving her hand in dismissal. “Sorry about Brainy, he may seem a little brash but he’s nice, I promise.”

“Brainy? Is that his name?”

“Brandon,” Imra says, smiling fondly. And beautifully. “He was working the graveyard shift because our guy had the flu.”

Kara nods. There’s nothing more to say really at that point, but Imra remains standing there with her smile and open expression and Kara doesn’t want to leave her orbit just yet. She fumbles. “So, there’s a… flu going around?”

She makes a mental note to slap herself later back in her room. Imra’s nostrils flare like she’s trying not to laugh, but _bless her_ for not and just going along with it. Kara could just about feel her skin boiling off of her face. “I meant more a cold, sorry,” she says amusedly. “Wouldn’t want to have you checking out so quickly just because of a flu going around, mm?”

Kara fumbles again. She has to move when a gentleman passes her to get into the inn and ends up closer to Imra, inhaling a delightful scent of bergamot, old books, tea. It’s Imra who saves the conversation and her, by extension. “Indefinite stay, right? We get a strange lot of those.”

“Oh, yes. I’m on a… leave.” Kara smiles tightly. “For my health. This was recommended by a friend of mine actually. He stayed over for the same reason last year.”

“Ah, quite the reputation we’ve developed.”

“The sleepy, quiet, coastal town vibe helps.” Kara tries for humor, and it works. Imra’s grin is damning.

“Well, I’m pleased to have you and hope that you get better. But, what is that you, ah… said you have? I’m sorry, not to pry—”

“Oh, no, no, it’s okay,” Kara saves in a hurry. Imra closes her mouth and her expression gets somber. Curious. Enthralling. “It’s nothing like that. It’s more… work—stress-related. I just need some time off from the city.”

“I can understand that. Nothing like the sea and some open air,” Imra says. Briefly, just briefly, she gets this distant look on her face that Kara wants to touch, explore its roots, just a little bit, and Imra opens her mouth but she’s interrupted by someone calling her name. They turn together. Who Kara knows now as Brainy is coming up the dirt track leading to the inn, lugging boxes with little plastic bags on top of them.

“And such is my cue,” Imra says. She steps back from Kara and pivots, putting on a wan smile. “It was nice meeting you, Kara. I hope you enjoy your stay.”

She leaves Kara’s space and to Kara it feels like waking up from a dream, touching down with recalibrated gravity. Kara takes a peek at the board Imra had been writing on before walking into the inn with clammy hands in her pockets. Lunch special is apparently lasagna with a serving of garlic bread.

* * *

 

Kara remembers to call Alex to let her know how she’s settled down and Alex sounds tired, but worried about her. She tells Alex about her room, the dark floorboards and the mocha-colored wallpapers, the kitchenette in the corner, the heater (which she tests out, as she mentions it) that doesn’t work, the cheap sheets, the TV with a decent enough number of channels and the Wi-Fi that isn’t the best, but works. She says nothing of the pretty inn owner with the nice voice and nicer smile and how Kara’s body felt, hearing her say her name.

Alex, in turn, tells her of the pressure on the SPD and how they’ve gotten a little more anxious about protests and marches. “ _Good news is, we finally decided to do it your way and look at possible links to the runaways with Cadmus_.”

“They’re not runaways.”

“ _Not until we know for sure, Kara_ ,” Alex says with a heavy sigh. Kara shuts it. “ _I shouldn’t even be telling you about this, you left so you could get away from this crap_.”

“It’s fine. I like staying connected to current events,” Kara says. While Alex is making a sound of vague disapproval, Kara picks up the clock on her bedside to look at. 12:15pm. “How’s your face? The bruise?”

“ _Huge_.” Kara chuckles. “ _For real. If I cover up my right eye, I swear I can’t see properly with my left one_.”

“Well alright, I think I’ve held you back long enough from work.” Kara puts the clock back down. Alex sighs again, exhausted. “Hey, work hard but not too hard. Eat something and drink your water. Tell Sam and Ruby hi for me.”

“ _Yes, ma’am_.”

 

The Legionnaire’s extension restaurant is artfully sparse, patrons being mostly singles in tables far from the other and the odd gathering of a small family. Lunch is served to her by a good-looking man with a friendly voice and a scraggly beard. She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t hoping to see Imra, but owners probably have better things to do than hang around their places of business all day. Still, though, she figured she’d at least be eating here.

As it turns out, Imra does eat here, but _here_ as in the establishment in general. Kara finds her at the check-in booth eating on the counter, hunched over, head swiveling between her plate of lasagna and a book she’s spread open on the countertop. Kara steps back from the stairs and approaches with no concrete plan of attack, at all, a moth drawn to a flame.

It’s an apt analogy. She feels her face warming as soon as Imra’s head tips up at the sound of her footsteps. Imra, damn her, smiles.

“Kara,” she says with a familiarity that tickles Kara in all the right spots. She pushes her plate of lasagna to the side to make room, slips a card into her book and closes it. Kara sneaks a peek at the title: _The Yellow Heart_. “Have you eaten?”

“Yeah.” Kara rubs the back of her neck, caught off-guard by the starter. “I can see you are, right now. Eating.”

“So I am.” Imra’s eyes read amused. “How can I help you?”

Kara’s brain isn’t entirely useless around a pretty girl. It pings with the first plausible thing to say and she speaks it as casually as she can, keeping her foot away from mouth. “I just… I tried the heater in my room a while ago and it’s… not working.”

Imra blinks. The faint blush on her cheeks is wonderful. “Oh, really? I’m so sorry, I’ll have someone check on it right away. Could you wait a couple of minutes? Just until lunch is done.”

Kara agrees because of course she does, and Imra abandons her book completely. They spend a minute at least just going back and forth with apologies and reassurances before simmering down to a casual conversation. The pink on Imra’s cheeks takes some time to fade.

Their conversation goes from the weather, to the quiet people of the town, to the diner Kara had breakfast in: to impersonal things that she finds absolutely no satisfaction in. She wants to ask about things—to _really_ know things, ask Imra why she’s in the middle of bumfuck nowhere running an inn, what does she do when she’s not here, who is she when she’s not the Imra who runs this inn.

But those are probably too much, so Kara just settles for the simplest thing she could think of. “What’s that book?”

“Oh.” Imra puts down her fork to pick up the book in question. She turns the cover Kara’s already seen to her, but Kara still makes a show of inspecting it. “The Yellow Heart. An… anthology of poems. By Pablo Neruda.”

“You like poetry?”

“Literature in general,” Imra says. She puts the book down to pick up her utensil again but just holds it there in her hand, face to Kara, and Kara feels warmth in that. “I enjoy reading a great deal. I actually had to write a paper on Neruda once, when I was in college.”

Now, _now_ they’re getting somewhere. Kara leans her elbow on the countertop as casually as possible. “You studied Literature in college?”

“Art,” Imra says with a brandish of her fork. She makes swishing, painting motions with it, and Kara laughs. “I’m an illustrator.” She pauses, frowns for a second but she picks up again, and Kara makes a note of how she pointedly looks down at her lasagna to stab a mouthful. “ _Was_ an illustrator. I’m from Liverpool. Based out in Portland for a while.”

“I live up in Seattle,” Kara supplies and Imra, chewing, looks back up with interest. “I’ve got roots somewhere smaller, though.” A moment of pause between them, then. Imra has gone back to eating and Kara may be projecting, but it almost seems like she wants her to ask about that. _Was an illustrator_ , she said, and now she’s running an inn in this sleepy, seaside town. Kara raps her knuckles on the counter and ponders it.

She doesn’t get to ask at all because a man comes up to the check-in booth, shedding his apron. Kara recognizes him from the restaurant. Imra’s posture stiffens before she regards him. “Mike,” she says. Mike turns. His eyes bounce from Imra to Kara. “Kara’s heater isn’t working.”

Her name is said so familiarly, so easily that Kara almost zones out, misses it when Mike asks her, “what room?”

“Five.”

“I got it,” Mike declares before slipping through a door deeper into the booth. He emerges with a hefty-looking toolbox.

Imra calls for a quick substitute to watch the counter while she comes up to Kara’s room with Mike. She stands with Kara, arms crossed and face slack, watching Mike work on setting the heater right. He smells of food from the restaurant kitchen, an undercurrent of grease and sweat, a hard day’s work musk. It’s quiet in the room save for metallic clinking and Mike’s occasional swearing.

Mike turns it on and off twice and goes through heat settings to test it out and Kara nods afterwards. “Thanks,” she says to them both, and Mike gives a jerky nod. Imra is already walking out.

Mike tells her something out of the room and Imra responds, eyes to him but body angled away, already poised to leave. She goes first. Mike fidgets before following. There. There’s something there.

* * *

 

They develop something of a routine in the days that follow, her and Imra. Kara eats breakfast, but not before heading outside for _some air_ and chatting Imra up while she writes down the day’s restaurant specials on the board by the window. And then come lunch, she’ll eat whatever the special is and will hover at the check-in booth after to talk with Imra again for a while. She always has books for when it’s her there (it’s Brainy during the evenings, Kara’s observed) and she goes through them quickly because it’s a new one almost every day.

When it’s not Mike, it’s other people coming for business that interrupt them, and Kara will leave quietly to head out into the town or back up to her room. It’s not to say that the inn’s business is booming, though: Kara has counted only five familiar patrons so far and two of them are a couple. Usually it’s mail and the mail man stays to chat, or a delivery of goods and the trucker stays to chat, or whoever else who stays to chat because in a small town like this everyone knows everyone.

The routine ends in the evenings because Kara just can’t seem to find Imra anywhere in the inn after sunset. She’s figured maybe resting in her quarters somewhere, or some other thing that _surely_ isn’t her business, but thinks about anyway. In the evenings, she has the dinner special, some wine if not a good, hard-hitting scotch, fiddles with her phone, and then falls asleep. Alex calls sometimes to check on her and reluctantly tell her about the situation in Seattle.

“ _You know, Google’s a thing. There are news_.”

“It’s still better to hear things straight from someone who’s there. A detective, no less. And I’m off the internet, my notifications are incredible.”

Alex tells her about the body of one of the runaways that turned up but insists there’s nothing there yet, because as far as they could tell he was mugged and thrown to the side of the road, just outside Seattle. “ _Probably hitchhiked with the wrong guy. We’re still looking into it_.”

Sam commandeers the phone briefly to ask about the place while the drone of Alex tutoring Ruby on biology floats in the background. “ _Lena asked about you. She offered up one of her vacation houses for you to squat in_.”

“No,” Kara says, voice levelled, Imra’s laughter playing on a loop in her head. “I’m alright here.” She still doesn’t tell them about her.

All the better, too, because she heads down at a little past 8 for one more glass of scotch to tide her over to sleep. Imra has just stepped in when she gets down. Mike comes up to her and gives her an affectionate peck on the lips, taking her coat, rubbing her arms to no doubt get off some of the outdoor cold. Imra doesn’t see Kara slip out and into the restaurant.

* * *

 

The proprietors of the fine establishment The Legionnaire are married to one another, one Imra Ardeen and one Mike Matthews. They’re both gorgeous and charming and are meant for each other. Kara watches the last of her groceries disappear into the bag.

“They’ve been married, what, three years?” the old lady says above the grating ring of the cash register. “Came here about two years ago and bought that old thing. It was owned by dear old Thomas Coville before, God rest his soul, and they did a good job cleaning it up. Built that restaurant, too. Their eggs benedict really is the best.”

Kara drives back to the inn in a daze and damn near leaves her groceries in the car. It’s 12:31 when she walks in, well into lunch time. Sure enough Imra is at the check-in booth poring over a meal and a book. Kara’s internal debate is ended no other by her: she looks up when the door shuts and smiles, and Kara’s heart, ever the masochistic traitor, soars.

“Kara,” she says with a wave. “Have you eaten?”

Kara blames it on a starter like that, making her smile and approach.

“Not yet.” She lifts her bag of groceries. A cup of Maruchan is pressed tightly enough to the plastic that it’s visible. “Did some adulting.”

“Adulting,” Imra parrots, amused. She jabs her fork down at her meal: buttered chicken tenders. “Want a bite, then? I won’t be able to finish this all.”

Kara almost accepts because damn her, that’s why. Whatever bumbled agreement on the tip of her tongue rolls back when the door opens, and Mike comes up to the counter, and all three of them, collectively, weirdly, seem to freeze.

Kara turns. Halfway to the check-in booth is a pasty-looking girl with stark blonde hair and what she figures would be a sunny disposition under the current horror. “Your… vegetables,” she says, slow and quiet. She lifts the boxes in her hands for emphasis. “Brainy didn’t show up this morning so dad had me…”

“Ah, right, Brainy caught the flu from Kev. He’s resting.” Imra sounds neutral. Too neutral, in fact, that Kara turns back around and watches as she walks around the counter in controlled motions. Her spine is set straight. “Thank you, Eve.”

“Uh—Imra, I can take it,” Mike offers.

“I have it.” Clipped. Imra receives the boxes without further fanfare and Eve seems to be exerting a lot of effort into not meeting her eyes. She lifts the boxes, takes a moment to give Kara a fleeting smile, and excuses herself.

If Kara’s ever thought to ask herself (and she has) why Imra’s never mentioned her marriage or doesn’t wear a ring that she sure would have noticed, looking between Mike and Eve who fidget and pointedly ignore each other, she thinks that’s as good an answer as any.

* * *

 

On the phone (with Mike, she assumes, or some other attendant) Kara agreed to a weekly type of payment for her lodging. What she never thought to ask is whether they accept checks, so now her shoes are muddy and the hems of her jeans are damp, and she still hasn’t gotten around to getting herself an umbrella.

She should soon, she thinks, wiping mud off of her shoes as best as she could on the steps of the inn. _Mud tracker_ is not a very good name to have. Imra’s told her about how the first quarter of the year is mostly rain here, besides.

Speaking of Imra—she’s chatting with another what Kara assumes is a town local as she enters. She doesn’t have a decent excuse to interrupt often times but since now, _now_ she does, she swaggers in and chirps an easy, “excuse me?”

Imra’s face brightens. Her smile is dazzling. “Kara. Out and about in the rain?”

“The weekly.” Kara smiles sheepishly and waves the bank envelope before handing it to Imra. “The first of many.”

“Thank you,” Imra says with a comical bow of her head, still somehow regal to Kara’s eyes. She waves an idle hand to the stranger’s direction and it’s only then that Kara remembers there’s another person there. “Have you met Maggie?”

Kara turns. Maggie is a shorter woman in a blue bomber jacket, dark eyes, dark hair, and brown skin. Her lips are plump and unsmiling. Kara holds out a hand to her regardless and grins. “Hi! Kara.”

Maggie doesn’t take the hand. She rests her elbow on the countertop, looks Kara up and down, and then settles with staring at her square in the face. “Officer Sawyer,” she drawls. Kara’s heart drops. “You’re Kara Danvers, aren’t you? The reporter from CatCo?”

Kara’s heart drops lower and so does her hand. “You’re not here to ruin Oregon’s fine, functioning police force now too, are you?” Maggie soldiers on. Her gaze gets just a little sharper, the line of her jaw tighter, and Kara takes a slow step back. She’s blanched. “So this is where you ended up after they fired you.”

“ _Maggie_ ,” Imra whispers sharply. Maggie sighs. Kara takes a deep breath and excuses herself without looking either of them in the face.

 

The TV right now is all the usual news of celebrities, oil prices, and someone in the government caught saying something dumb. Kara has more luck on the internet. She has a mountain of new, nasty notifications and she swipes them away to fire up Google.

CatCo released a statement regarding her personal blog and stated the company has no ties to it, which is true. In that same statement, it was also mentioned that the owner of this personal blog, _Kara Danvers_ , has been terminated from CatCo’s employ due to her wildly unethical course of action, which is also true, and CatCo promises to set straight what she has ruined.

Stations naturally picked it up and ran repeat footages of the day of the riot with the segment. She watches Leslie talk about her termination with the straight face that landed her the anchor position in the first place. Then she disconnects from the Wi-Fi again, throws her phone under her pillow, and hides her face away in her room for the rest of the day.

 

It’s Alex who wakes her up. She pulls her phone out from under her pillow and has half a mind to hit reject but knowing Alex, she’ll take it as a sign to call 70 more times. She answers. “Alex, I’m not in the mood.”

“ _Okay, hello to you too. What’s wrong now?_ ”

In the background, Kara hears Sam ask _is she moping?_ and rolls her eyes. “My firing was broadcasted on national TV, so yes, I’m moping.”

There are whispers of _shut up_ and _get outta here_ before Alex returns to the line. “ _Right, I thought you’ve disconnected yourself from the modern world and are only taking updates from me?_ ”

“I…” Kara thinks of Officer Sawyer. Her sharp eyes, her sharper tongue, the way she drawled Kara’s name like it was something foul. “I just thought it up. Had this weird urge. Hey, Alex. What do they say about me at the station?”

Alex takes too long to respond. It’s an answer enough. “ _Don’t think about that. You’re on break_.”

So she doesn’t. She opens the window with the dumb draft and inhales a lungful of seaside breeze. It smells like wet earth, damp grass, the way the world always does after rain. It’s pretty dark for 6pm but it’s stopped raining and the air is cool, and she figures the streets should be decently clear at this time.

She postpones a shower for later and throws on her running digs. Just to get her mind off things.

The town is familiar to her by now. Its sleepy pace, the small houses in the suburban quarter, the low-rise buildings. Lenny’s is the local grocery and the shelves are flaking cream matching the off-white of the tiles. Everything there is stock from overseas that could be bought at Costco in bulk for cheap. There are exactly two other local food places competing with The Legionnaire and one small McDonald’s spot frequented by mostly teenagers.

There’s an elementary school in the immediate vicinity and two others farther from the coast, a high school even farther, and then a community college in about a 30-minute drive. A lot of the people who walk around in the early mornings are truckers just getting off a long, cross-country trip and would readily kill for a bed and warm sheets. Kids grow up in this place to one day leave it, and that’s just the way things are.

There’s a point of interest in the town, though, that Kara’s made plans to see but has never gotten around to. The old lady at Lenny’s mentioned a lighthouse by the beach, on the far edge of town, overlooking where the rocks meet the sea. “It’s not much,” she’d said, “but we have it.”

It’s a steep climb to there that makes her chest burn regardless of her athleticism. It doesn’t help that she hasn’t done anything in a week and the lethargy is still slowly, slowly rolling out of her by tiny degrees. Still, she makes it, damp grass under her shoes, fire inside her knees, and finds a truck parked nearby the lighthouse.

The lighthouse isn’t as grand as she expected, but Imra’s there.

Imra doesn’t see her yet. She’s leaned on the hood of her (Mike’s) truck and is looking out at the sea. Kara would think she’s a ghost, a dream, something ethereal and intangible if she hasn’t met her already.

How Imra notices her is anticlimactic, to say the least. Kara steps on a twig. She hisses _crap_ under her breath. She surveys the damage and looks back up to find Imra facing her, hands in the pockets of her coat, hair whipping with the wind, grinning. There’s a moon tonight, big and bright, and the light of it hang glides off her lashes, the line of her nose, the right curve of her jaw. Right now, in this light, Kara would do anything for her.

“Evening run?” Imra asks, a question and a teasing all in one. Kara looks down at her leggings, her old hoodie. Her shirt is soaked clean through under it. She is suddenly hyperaware of the fact that she hasn’t showered yet.

“I believe in health and fitness,” Kara replies. That gets her intended effect: Imra laughs. Kara comes closer. “What are you doing here?”

“I come here sometimes in the evening.” Imra makes room for Kara on the hood of the truck and Kara tentatively leans her tailbone on the bumper. Kara can smell her. Can touch her if she wants to, is brave enough to. “When I need my head cleared.”

“It feels nice here.”

“It does.”

Kara’s sweat starts to dry but Imra doesn’t know that—she hands Kara a handkerchief and points to her own face, along the temples. “Sweat,” she says. _Kara’s sweat starts to dry_ but she takes it anyway, inhales all of Imra as she wipes it down her face. It’s copper with triangle patterns. Earthy.

She clutches it for strength for when she speaks again. “Imra. What Officer Sawyer said… this morning…”

“Maggie had no right to do that,” Imra says. She’s turned to the sky, eating up the moonlight. Kara would do anything, anything, _anything_ for her. “We all have our secrets. We choose to keep them for a reason.”

Kara wonders if Imra isn’t just talking about her now. “You knew?”

“Not right away. I looked up your name in the record when I first met you and recognized it. I’m aware Google is a thing.”

“You don’t think too badly of me, do you?”

Imra looks back to her and her face, moonlit, is the most gentle thing Kara has ever seen. “We do things with good intentions that backfire. It happens.” She smirks, though not unkindly. “I think you somewhat got what you deserve, anyway, seeing as you’re here.”

Despite herself, Kara huffs and laughs. Imra laughs with her.

“Can I show you something while we’re here?”

Imra pushes off of the truck and Kara does the same, staring. Here is Imra. Half-sheened silver. Half a woman and half Kara’s breath, stolen right from her lungs. Married. Probably straight. Now and probably forever unavailable. Now and probably forever the means to Kara’s end. She must take Kara’s silence as an assent because she cocks her head in gesture to follow before turning around to walk. She heads for the lighthouse.

Kara’s heart, now and probably forever a masochistic traitor, gives chase. She jogs to catch up with Imra.


	2. show our hands

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm gonna keep writing for this crackship. no one can stop me

Kara still dreams about that night sometimes.

In dreams, she sees Imra’s back shrouded in shadow, just the faintest lines of her shoulders and the curves of her waist that Kara would be able to touch if she reaches out. The graffiti on the walls that grow more sparse as they ascend the spiral staircase, the nasts that flit about and the heavy moist in the air that doesn’t sit well with her nasal pathways. She hears Imra grunt as she heaves open the door at the top, the full of her weight shoving it open. She hears the ugly, rusty creak.

And then she sees the sea as they step through the door, so vast and so wide and so near that Kara feels like if she spread her arms far enough, it’ll take her, make her a part of it. She sees Imra grin with delight and lean on the railing, sees the wind push her hair off her shoulders and watch Kara with eyes like condensed galaxies. Hears her laugh and embody everything that Kara wants to discover about the mortal world and beyond.

Once she wakes up, Kara always just lies there on her bed and kneads her toes on the Costco sheets. She remembers the calm lull of their voices as they talked about everything, something, nothing. How it is in the town, the life with the locals, the weather that’s mostly wet and sufficiently cool even on days with sun all year round. Imra’s hometown, Kara’s decision in Seattle and its consequences, the lighthouse. Kara recalls how her eyes kept darting to Imra’s hands, slender to the eyes and calloused to the touch. That bare ring finger that still haunts her two weekly payments later.

Imra had looked at her like she was waiting for Kara to ask, smiling as she talked about random, easy things. They entered a completely different dimension to their relationship that night, one that Kara could choose to delve deeper into or turn away from. Imra had let her into her secret little place, given her a fragment of herself, showed her where she goes when Kara (and everyone else) couldn’t find her. Whatever choice Kara makes, she knows, there’ll be no turning back.

As it is, she’s still standing on the precipice of what could be something great or something incredibly foolish. Futile. Maybe even painful. In Kara’s mind, Imra had shown her hand: now Kara has to show her own.

Their routine carries on like it’s all nothing, though. Their conversations are still simple: current events around town, some drunken debacle in the local pub, Brainy who Kara has learned is like a brother to Imra and is nicknamed Brainy for a reason. In the evenings she couldn’t sleep and resorts to scotch, Kara has seen Brainy time and again reading great, big tomes on computer science and statistics at the check-in booth.

“He wants to go to MIT,” Imra says, twirling a lump of spaghetti over and over around the tines of her fork but not putting any in her mouth. “It’ll be no easy thing obviously. We tried applying for financial aid.”

“What about his parents?” Kara asks, flicking her thumb through the pages of Imra’s current book. Sylvia Plath this time: _The Colossus and Other Poems_. Imra makes a thoughtful sound and finally crams spaghetti into her mouth. She chews. Sauce stains the corner of her lips. Kara stares at it, trance-like, before gesturing with a thumb.

“He only has his dad now, and he’s not exactly too keen on the prospect of higher, _expensive_ education.” Imra uses to back of her hand to smear the stain away. An uncultured habit, but still somehow graceful when she does it. “Not that Brainy expects anything from him in the first place. They’re not exactly well-off.”

It doesn’t surprise Kara at this point, how quickly she wishes she were just a little bit richer so she could help out, be on the receiving end of Imra’s grateful grace. She nibbles the inside of her lip. “How’d it go with the financial aid?”

Imra rolls her head and shrugs her shoulders. Her smile is sad. “Well… you can see the inn isn’t exactly _bustling_ and we have little to offer. Government people can be hardasses.”

“Scholarships?”

“A lot of competition and waiting lists, Kara.” Imra sighs, dropping her chin onto her palm and going back to just twirling her fork. “Brainy’s already lost the drive and I don’t want to too, but it’s all getting rather…” Her fork stops. Her shoulders sag, just a little. “Impossible.”

Mike chooses that moment to squirrel into the booth smelling of food and sweat. He smiles at Kara cordially, leans over and whispers something to Imra and all the while, his eyes linger on Kara. Studious.

Imra nods without looking at him and flashes Kara a faint smile. “Excuse me.” She disappears into the back room. Mike takes up Imra’s post and pushes her plate of spaghetti to the side, blinking at Kara.

“Busted heater again?”

“Oh, no.” Kara starts to back away. “Everything’s alright.”

 

Kara doesn’t go back to the lighthouse. It’s sacred— _Imra’s_. It’s where she goes to clear her head and look at the sea and she’s been doing it alone for what Kara surmises is a long time now. Entering once is okay, but pushing it, intruding, may just end up being tiresome. Desperate too, on her part.

So nights are wine or scotch and the regular phone call from Alex. Sometimes it’s Sam because Ruby needs help with biology or chemistry, and sometimes it’s Ruby because Ruby insists. Once, it’s J’onn mid-game night and he sounds understandably wary, but still concerned for her.

“ _Is the place working wonders for you yet?_ ”

“I can see what you meant about peace and quiet, that’s for sure.” Kara picks a lint off her sweats. In the background, someone hoots victory and Alex’s shriek of _are you kidding_ me cuts through like a knife. “Is that charades?”

J’onn starts laughing at something. “ _Yes, and Alex and Winn just lost. Hold on, I have to get her off of him before she breaks his neck_.”

The call crackles. The phone is juggled around before landing on Sam. “ _Rubes, don’t encourage Alex, okay—hey, Kara? Hi, sorry. A little energetic tonight_.”

“I miss you guys.” Kara sighs, tries out a laugh that spills sad and wilting. Her room is quiet. Other than the racket of game night through her speakers, there’s the dull hum of the heater and the gentle whipping of her curtain because of the dumb draft: sounds of her own loneliness.

“ _Well, have you found your center yet and are ready to come back?_ ”

“Funny,” Kara drawls. “I think I’ll stay a little longer. I don’t think my panic-inciting face has dropped off the radar yet.”

“ _Stay away as long as you need to, Kar. You know we’ll be here_ ,” Sam says, soothing even with all the noise in the background. It’s the mother in her, Kara thinks. She sounds like Eliza, like her birth mother before the plane crash. It’s not the best train of thought to board but it’s where Kara’s brain goes.

She takes a deep breath and holds it. She sits up, phone dropping from her chest to her lap. Someone is laughing distantly in the speakers. “Well. I’ll leave you guys to it. My show is on.”

“ _Right, alright. Take care_.”

Brainy gives her a passing glance from the check-in counter as she ambles down to the restaurant. He gives her one more later on her way back up, her eyelids already drooping from three glasses of scotch.

* * *

 

Alex arrives for her visit one particularly glum Wednesday morning. It’s drizzling and the sky is a sullen shade of gray that contrasts perfectly with Kara’s brand new periwinkle umbrella, held up with one hand while the other presses her phone up to her ear. On the line, Sam is telling Ruby to gather up her backpack while Alex complains to her about the rain.

“Yeah—yeah. I see you. Right, _hi!_ ”

Kara ends the call, waves her arm in wide arcs unnecessarily and the windshield of Alex’s car may be tinted, but Kara still knows she’s in there rolling her eyes.

She damn near drops her umbrella in her hurry to wrap Alex up in a hug, swaying her back and forth. Alex’s exasperated laugh is hot on her earlobe. They shimmy over to cover and Kara disconnects them to hug Sam, and then Ruby, who tells her “you look paler,” with a crinkle on her nose. Kara pinches it to smoothen it out.

“Missed you too.” She clicks the umbrella shut. Alex drags mud off her soles on the front steps of the inn. “How was the drive? You guys didn’t get lost, did you?”

“Apple Maps can go die,” Alex gripes in lieu of an answer. Sam snickers and Kara’s grin splits her face in half. “Come on, I wanna lie down for a while.”

Alex visibly relaxes once inside. It’s warmer—dry. Kara chucks her umbrella into the umbrella bin nearby and, sans her usual bright greeting of Kara (always _Kara_ , and Kara loves that it’s always just _Kara_ ) Imra almost goes unnoticed at the check-in booth just standing there, blinking owlishly at her and her three new companions. Almost. “Oh,” Kara intones. “Imra! Wait—here’s my sister.”

Alex gives Kara a look as she leads them to scurry over to the booth. Imra must remember herself because she straightens up to smile. How someone could look so dazzling even with pallid cheeks and a red-rubbed nose is beyond Kara. “Good morning,” she chirps, voice clogged with a cold. She’d been sniffing nonstop earlier this morning when Kara came out for their usual chat (and the usual _some air_.) Kara ended up writing the specials for her, to let her blow her nose. _I think I caught it from Brainy or just the weather, I don’t know,_ she’d said sheepishly.

“This is Alex.” Imra’s eyes bounce accordingly. “And Sam, and her daughter Ruby.

“This is Imra,” Kara says with a grin she tries to control: _fails_ to control. “She owns the place.” If any of them notice she doesn’t know, because they’ve started to exchange genial pleasantries and Alex even does her little squared-shouldered nod, a habit she’s developed from years as a detective. Asserting her presence.

“Welcome.” And there it is again, Imra’s radiance, dazzling. The sniffing does little to deter it. Thumbing the record book, she asks, “are they—are you getting a room?”

“Oh, no, no. Just came to visit my sister here for a day.” Alex elbows Kara for emphasis. Kara nudges her elbow away with a pout. “She was getting a little lonely.”

Imra’s eyes flit from sister to sister before her smile gets cheeky. “And here I thought I was doing a good job keeping her company.”

Alex’s brow quirk radiates in waves. Kara flushes and stammers. “You are! You are. My sister’s just—”

“I was joking, Kara,” Imra says impishly with a slow shake of her head. She closes her record book and while Kara stands there doing an admirable impression of a beet, she sniffs behind her handkerchief and smiles at all four of them. “Well, just come let me know if plans change or if I can help with anything. In the mean time, enjoy your visit.”

“Thanks.” It’s Sam who responds. Alex is busy pinching Kara’s side and Kara keeps surreptitiously batting her hand away. Sam does Kara a solid: she pushes between her and Alex with Ruby in tow and occupies Imra’s full attention. “Actually—do you know some good places to visit? While we’re here?”

Imra rolls her lips into her mouth once, pops them back out with a knowing smile. “There’s not much in the way of sightseeing, unfortunately, but there’s a marina just at the edge of town.”

“Boats?” Ruby pipes up. Imra grins sweetly at her and parrots, _boats_ with mirrored excitement.

“I know where it is,” Kara says, having recovered. She has a firm grip on Alex’s fingers. “It’s just past the trailer park. Across the beach? Right by the warehouses?” She looks to Imra for a confirmation.

“Pretty sure no one could miss a _marina_ at the _edge_ of town, Kar,” Alex mutters. She inhales sharply when Kara tightens her grip on her fingers and amends, “looks like that’s where we’re going.”

 

Up in Kara’s room, Alex heads straight for the bed and collapses on it face first. Sam falls on top of her and they tangle, and Kara is left to sit on the beat-up couch in the corner. Ruby glances around, absorbs the whole room in about six seconds, and then asks, “Kara, where’s your bathroom?”

“Just down by the kitchenette. That little door over there—yeah.”

The bathroom door shuts. As soon as it does, Sam comments, “it’s a lovely inn.”

“Mm.”

“Lovely innkeeper,” Alex says.

Sam’s chuckle is muffled on the scoop of Alex’s shoulder blades. Even seeing how Kara’s lips purse and her knees bunch together, Alex soldiers on. “Keeping you company, really? I thought you were lonely.”

“I am,” Kara mutters. Louder, “and shut up, she’s married.”

The bed frame creaks. Sam has lifted her entire upper body off of Alex’s back and Alex, her head off of the pillow. They stare at Kara half in scrutiny, half in disbelief, like they’re expecting some kind of punchline that’ll come any second. It never does.

“You’re playing with fire, little sister,” Alex says. Sam flattens herself against Alex again.

“That’s kind of her hobby, isn’t it?”

Kara doesn’t get to respond because there’s the sound of a grating toilet flush and then the door opens to let Ruby out. Not that she intended to respond or even wanted to, but it’s a good excuse to switch lanes. “Business went okay?” she quips to Ruby.

“A-okay.” Ruby climbs onto the bed and nudges Sam with a knee. “Mom, make room.”

“There isn’t room to make,” Alex says. She shuffles off from under Sam and lands on her ass on the floor, feet and palms slapping a real ruckus. Kara hopes whoever’s below them doesn’t mind it too much. “Hey, there’s a bank here, right? Or an ATM?”

“Yeah, I make my withdrawals weekly. For the lodging.”

Alex’s nose wrinkles. “They don’t take checks?”

Kara turns away and pretends to sift through the pockets of her discarded jeans for her car keys. Just to hide the heat she can feel crawling from her throat to her cheeks. “I keep forgetting to ask if they do. Wanna go?”

“Yeah. Sam?”

“Ruby and I are staying.” Sam’s voice is muffled. “Just gonna take a quick nap before lunch.”

“It’s a nice room, Kara,” Ruby offers, just as muffled.

“Thanks.” Kara turns to Alex and twirls her keys. “Let’s?”

When they head out, Kara doesn’t forget to stop by the check-in booth to bid Imra a quick goodbye. Imra, though pale, though sniffing, smiles a sun spot smile that makes Alex’s furtive, pointed look worth it. She does, however, forget the umbrella and Alex has to double back to grab it.

Kara turns on the engine and ups the heater. Alex keeps the umbrella on the carpet, snug between her feet. “She’s really pretty,” she says, opening the glove compartment for tissues to dry her jacket sleeve with. “She isn’t wearing a ring.”

Kara sighs because as usual, Alex is right. About both.

* * *

 

Lunch is at The Legionnaire, because the lunch special is New York-style pizza and also because _of course_. The rain is heavier: the windows are cloudy with condensation, and the view of the dirt track outside and the rest of the town beyond ripples with the splashes of raindrops. In the restaurant it’s sparse, as it often is, only three other tables occupied in addition to theirs. A jukebox plays 80’s hits in the corner. Mike takes their orders with a charming grin that has Ruby making heart eyes at him as he heads off, going so far as to ask Kara, “are you friends with him, too?” Kara chuckles, scratches behind her ear, and mutters, “he fixed my heater so I guess?”

 _When Doves Cry_ titters in the background of Alex’s retelling of Seattle’s most recent events. “We found another one,” her eyes dart briefly to Ruby, “of… _those_. The same thing happened to him as the first. Yeah, yeah— _I know_ , don’t look at me like that. We’re suspicious now.”

“You should be terrified, not just suspicious. You guys should be _all_ over this,” Kara says gravely. “It might not be what _I_ think, but someone’s still going around doing that stuff.”

Alex’s jaw tightens but she sighs the tension out the next second. “We _are_ all over this, but there’s a process. Don’t be too hard on us.”

Kara swallows and backs off, whispering an apology. Alex nods her head jerkily but manages a smile. Exasperated, though still fond. They reach for each other’s hand briefly before Kara’s attention is stolen by a restaurant crew boy headed to the inn with a covered plate. Where she’s sitting, Kara need only tilt her body the right way to see a glimpse of the inn’s receiving room—and she does. The crew boy deposits the plate onto the check-in counter. She doesn’t see Imra but she sees her hand, lifting the cover off.

Alex and Sam are watching her with a strange look of knowing. Alex in particular looks ready to tell her _no_ but her mind’s already made up. “I’ll be right back,” is all she leaves them with. Alex flounders. Sam hushes her and Ruby, mature as she is for her age, raised by a single mother and who has more than once insisted that if Sam’s happiness is with Alex then Alex can stay, just looks fascinated.

Imra’s head tips up before Kara could even get close enough. She smiles (as always.) She greets, “Kara,” (as always) and ( _as always_ ) follows up with, “have you eaten?” Kara should be well used to it all by now but her heartbeat still picks up, as hard as she may keep wishing it doesn’t next time.

“I’m about to. With my sister.” She jerks her thumb over her shoulder. “About that, actually—do you wanna maybe join us?” Imra’s brows rise a fraction. “Or something. Only–only if you want to, of course. Or… if you could.”

“Me?” Imra repeats dumbly, pointing to herself. Her face paints shock well. Kara rarely gets her off-guard—it’s always Imra, Imra shifting the ground under Kara’s feet. The switch is so nice that Kara just revels in it for a moment and smiles.

“Yeah!” Kara tucks her chin into her chest and clears her throat. “I mean, if you’d like. You’re all alone here and… everything.”

Imra glances at the entryway connecting the inn to the restaurant. Then down at her food, a generous slice of pizza yet untouched. There’s pink on her cheeks and regret in her eyes when she looks at Kara again. “I’m sorry, but my post…”

“Oh—”

“You can go,” says someone behind Imra. Brainy, emerging from the backroom, pulling on a dark knit sweater. His stomach is soft-looking, riddled with freckles and moles. He peers at Kara over the collar interestedly and then regards Imra. He pulls the sweater down. “If you won’t stay in bed like Mike and I want you to, then at least take it easy.”

Imra fidgets. “Are you sure?”

Brainy nods and shoos her away unsmilingly. Does he ever smile actually? “Take your food with you, I ate already.”

So Imra does. Her smile is shy and there’s the gentlest brush of pink on her cheeks when Kara guides her to sit next to Alex, opposite to Kara and within an arm’s reach of Sam. Ruby is sat the farthest from her but she’s still the first to chirp, “hi!” and when Sam backs that up with a delighted “hey! Imra, right?” Imra’s shoulders loosen.

“Imra, yes. I’m not intruding, am I?”

“Not at all,” Alex says with a smile, eyes flicking to Kara with meaning. Kara notices the fleur-de-lis pattern on the tablecloth and finds it _very_ fascinating. “The more the merrier.”

“Thanks for keeping Kara company while she’s here,” Sam says casually. “She may be all smiley but she’s soft and tender. We love her.”

Kara hides her mortification by redoing her ponytail to look at her lap. But Imra, Imra just laughs across from her and professes, “it’s my pleasure. I can see why you do.” Kara, head still down, feels her chest stutter. 

Their food is served by none other than Mike, just three plates of liberal slices of pizza and the complementary pitcher of iced tea. When he sees Imra there, sitting with impeccable posture next to Alex and with her own plate, he pauses just long enough that Kara feels a film of tension cloak their table like a heady stench.

“Imra,” he intones, slow to put on a pleasant smile. Imra turns to him and returns it.

“Mike. You won’t mind getting us four glasses, will you?”

Mike blows a quick raspberry and shakes his head. “Totally not.” He puts a hand to his chest and bows dramatically, eliciting a giggle from Ruby and still the same artificial smile from Imra. “Four glasses for the lovely ladies.”

He straightens up, hand still on his chest, and backs away. It’s his left hand. Kara couldn’t help zeroing in on the unmistakable glint of a wedding band on his ring finger.

 

Lunch is a pleasant affair, which should come as no surprise seeing as Imra can easily hold a conversation and Sam has charisma hammered into her by years and years of board meetings with grumpy, white men. Kara is her most talkative when the subject steers to the restaurant’s everyday specials and Imra laughs at her once or twice. It’s enough for Kara to never want to stop talking about food. Mike stops by again sometime into Sam’s tale about an almost-botched meeting in New York (“I was _so_ hungover,”) to hand them their glasses.

Kara can tell he’s trying to catch Imra’s eyes, but Imra is chuckling and shaking her head at Sam. Willfully or not, Kara doesn’t know.

The pleasantness of it all gets stilted just a tad when Alex asks, “so you own this place?” while clapping her hands free of crumbs. Kara knows Alex as well as one can know someone they’ve lived with for 13 years—Kara knows when she’s fishing for something. “How’d you come to own it?”

Imra, though the smile doesn’t leave her face, seems to mull it over. In her peripheral Kara can see the metaphorical elephant in the room running around banging pots and pans. That is to say Mike, hovering near another table. “I do, yes,” Imra says first. “It was owned by this man named Thomas Coville until around three years ago when he died. Then we bought it from his wife.”

“We?”

Kara braces herself. “Mike and I,” Imra says coolly.

Sam dabs a napkin at her mouth and wipes her fingers on it in the next motion. “Oh, so he’s…”

“We’re married,” Imra says with a wan smile. Her fingers pick at each other on the table, slow, little movements. Kara catches Alex looking at her as if to say _there you go_ and chews the corner of her lip, looking down at her iced tea. She picks it up to take a long drink. Imra steers the conversation to a different, but close, vein. “It was a halfway house of sorts before his death. But for faith, I suppose. Mr Coville was quite known for taking in anyone who looked down on their luck enough.”

“Kind of like Kara, but with cats,” Ruby says. Bless her. Alex snorts, Sam guffaws, and Imra belts out a surprised huff of laughter as she turns to Kara. Kara breaks into a sunburst smile and shrugs, and Imra, hiding half of her face and her sniffing behind her handkerchief, makes it hard for Kara not to put any meaning into the tender look in her eyes.

 

The marina is as sparse as the rest of the town on a glum day like this. Any minute it looks like it’ll rain again and Kara brought her umbrella just in case. Imra brought her own too, and let Alex, Sam, and Ruby borrow their own from the inn’s spare ones. Up ahead, past the few boats moored in scattered dots at the docks, there are lumbering warehouses and trailer trucks ready to leave in the evening. It smells exactly like how the surroundings look: salty, coated with something like old metal, machine oil, gasoline. The scent of industry.

Imra had surprised them all by offering to come along when Ruby asked about the marina. She’d procured a brochure from the check-in booth first, scrawled something along the bottom while giving them instructions. “Mr Rodas can be a grump, but he’s alright,” she said. “Just show him this and tell him I sent you to get a smile and maybe a good price…”

Kara had stared at the brochure. It had a picture of boats and a sunny sky with the town’s name at the top. It felt old and worn in her hand. Eventually, Imra seemed to take in Kara’s uncertainty because she went on to say, “maybe I should just come with you? So it’s all sure?”

Sam is taking pictures of Ruby by some boats while Alex hangs close by, smiling. Kara takes the opportunity to lead Imra aside.

“I got you this,” she says, handing over a plastic bag. Imra blinks at it. “Uh, just something for your…” Kara gestures around Imra’s red nose, “yeah.”

Imra takes it and peers in, smile slow to spread, cheeks getting some color. Alex had scrunched her face at Kara on the way back from the bank this morning when she said, “can we make a stop somewhere real quick? I just have to pick some stuff up.” Watching Kara pick up a pack of Kleenex, a bottle of water, crackers, and ask for cold medicine at the counter in the pharmacy made the scrunch of Alex’s face slack to something like utter awe with disbelief.

It slacks the same way now when she catches sight of the plastic bag looped around Imra’s wrist. Imra’s just knocked a tablet back and is sharing crackers with Kara. Kara can’t find it in her to feel even remotely concerned when Alex tosses her a disapproving glance.

Oscar Rodas is a dour-looking man with a bald head and a five o’clock shadow. His boat is a lot less dingy than how he looks though, and he stands up from his chair when they approach with Imra on the lead. The lines of his face relax a touch and Kara knows Imra smiles at him.

Ruby has her phone out as soon as the boat dislodges from the docks. Sam is seated with Alex, the both of them close enough that they may as well be snuggling. Imra had helped Kara up the boat earlier and now has a hand on her shoulder, pointing to where the lighthouse is visible from where they are. It’s only then that it occurs to Kara this is the first time they’ve touched again since their handshake. Her mind goes places: places like how it would feel to have Imra’s rugged palm on the flat on her stomach, finger tracing the divot of her navel. She’s ticklish there.

Oscar is a presence barely felt besides his manning of the boat. Ruby takes pictures. Sam and Alex speak like they’re telling secrets. Imra sits back, looking out at the sea as the sky darkens. And Kara, Kara watches her and feels things.

 

“Tell me you know what you’re doing,” Alex says, gripping Kara by the arms. Sam and Ruby are already in the car. Kara can still feel the ghost of Imra’s hand on her shoulder.

“I thought you don’t like it when I lie to you?”

Alex’s eyes narrow. She sighs, the sound like surrender, and pulls her sister in for a tight hug. “They take checks. I asked Imra a while ago.”

Kara colors. “Drive safe, okay?” she manages, and Alex tips her a thumbs up and a faint smile. “And don’t forget to keep me updated on things!”

Later, Imra is there to wish Kara good night for a change. She’s changed into comfier clothes and is unscrewing the water bottle Kara bought her as she talks to Brainy. Still half full. Spotting Kara emerging from the restaurant after her nightly scotch, Imra pauses to smile. Bids her, “good night, Kara.”

Kara’s last thoughts before she falls asleep are of how Imra’s fingers looked unscrewing the bottle and the ripple of her throat as she drank.

* * *

 

Brainy is the one who receives the week’s payment, much to Kara’s surprise—it’s always Imra there in the mornings. She hovers at the check-in booth longer than necessary, not saying anything, affecting nonchalance as she glances about.

Brainy, because he’s brainy, catches on. “Are you looking for Imra?”

Warmth shoots from Kara’s chest to her face. She rubs the back of her neck. “She went out with Mike. To Hillsboro. They won’t be back until later today,” Brainy says, looking intently at Kara. That’s how he always is—intense and completely focused if not wholly disinterested. He only has these two settings, it seems to Kara.

“Right,” Kara murmurs, calming the unease bubbling in her chest. Imra is with her husband, as she should be. She raps her knuckles on the counter.

“I can help if you need help with anything.” Brainy’s gone back to his textbook. Kara says the first plausible thing in her head to not make this situation any more telling.

“My window. It won’t shut all the way. Wind and rain keep, uh, getting in.”

Brainy looks up, blinks at her three times, and then stands up.

In her room, Kara stands a little to his left and watches him work. He tries forcing the window twice before popping open the toolbox for a knife and hammer, muttering something about paint build up. Up close, Kara can see his paleness is the kind that stems from being confined indoors for too long, probably just poring over his books, his studies. He wants to go to MIT. Kara thinks about that again.

“Hey, Brain—Bran—Brandon—”

“Brainy, please.” Brainy inserts the knife into the sash and hammers the handle gently.

“Brainy.” Kara nods. “Imra mentioned you… were looking to get into MIT?” Brainy turns to her without stopping his ministrations. With such focus, too, that Kara is baffled for all of two seconds. “Is–is that an okay thing to… mention, actually?”

“It’s true,” he says. He turns away. Slides the knife carefully. “I’d like to go to MIT but Imra and I haven’t been too lucky with actually getting me there.”

“Right. How–how do you know Imra again?”

“We lived in the same apartment complex in Portland when I was 15. When my mother died, it got harder for me to live with my father. She took me in.” He picks up the hammer again. “Helped me finish high school. I’ve been with her ever since.” Looking straight at Kara, he starts to lightly pound on the knife handle with all the ease of a seasoned multitasker. “That was five years ago.

“I just want to go to a good college somewhere. Graduate and then get a job that means something to me.” A crack sounds from the window. He slides the knife. “But my dad wanted me to drop out and get to working. He didn’t understand. Imra did.”

Something swells in Kara’s chest. Admiration? As if she didn’t have enough of it for Imra already. An ache too, for Brainy. She doesn’t know how it feels because Eliza and Jeremiah were capable, but she can imagine being held back from something. She thinks she’s been through enough to get an idea, at least. “That sounds…”

“Yeah.” Brainy nods when she trails off. “She’s a good person.”

Kara nods. And nods. “You know Mike too, then?” she tries. Though another interested look shines in Brainy’s eyes, all he offers is a bland _yes_ and focuses on the window. When it comes to details of his life, he speaks easily—it seems with others’, not so much. Kara respects that. She says no more.

* * *

 

The next morning is one of those odd sunny days Imra once told her about. Sunny enough for nothing but a light jacket or even a lighter flannel: the latter is Kara’s thing. The dirt track crunches pleasantly under her shoes and mud has been dried to stiff, rich, brown clay. Even The Legionnaire looks exponentially browner and homier in the sunlight. It feels good, too, turning her face to the sun. She squints against it.

In this sun, only one thing can be sunnier: “ _Brainy!_ ” The voice cuts through the morning like a shot in the dark, a lance of warmth that starts at Kara’s tailbone and traverses the length of her spine. “Brainy! Brandon!”

“So much shouting in the morning,” Kara teases when Imra comes into view. Imra, in a quarter sleeve sweater cut to accentuate the flare of her hips, stops in her tracks and lets out a sheepish laugh. “Is he in trouble?”

“A lot if he doesn’t come out, yes,” Imra professes. Hands on her hips, she shouts again. “ _Brainy!_ ”

A moment ticks past and then two, and Kara turns to Imra with raised brows. Imra’s face is scrunched. Annoyance makes her eyes narrow, her lips look a little more plump with how they’re pursed. “What’s it about anyway?” Kara asks.

Imra waves her hand. “Beer restock,” she says. “Cases of it. I just need his help moving it all from the truck.”

“What about Mike?” Imra looks to Kara and then away. She shrugs. Kara throws on her best grin and says _fuck it_. “Let me help.”

Imra looks scandaled at the idea but Kara just stands there and smiles, flexes her arms dramatically and says, “you’ll be done faster,” and Imra concedes.

There are, indeed, cases of it. Smaller ones of half-liter bottles and bigger ones of full liters. The back of Mike’s truck is stuffed full and Imra looks wary up until Kara picks up a liter tray with ease, lugging it through the restaurant’s back entrance and into the freezer. _Ice cold_ beer, exactly like people like it. They cloak the work with easy conversation—Oscar from the marina apparently thinks them pleasant enough, if only a little uneasy with Sam’s and Alex’s apparent relationship.

“He’s old fashioned,” Imra says when Kara’s face twists a little.

“How about you?”

Imra shrugs. “I think they’re meant for each other.”

Six trays in and Kara starts to feel the heat. She sheds her flannel without thinking and throws it over her shoulder, reaching for another tray. The realization that Imra has stopped to stare at her, _at her arms_ , mouth agape and unblinking, comes unhurried. Kara carries the tray, to test, and her arms flex. Imra blinks.

It’s her chuckling that makes Imra’s eyelids flutter and her eyes to snap up to Kara’s face. A harsh shade of red overtakes her awe. She chuckles, clipped, brows furrowed, hurrying to pick up another tray to look away.

It’s all Kara thinks about later in the shower.

* * *

 

“ _We found more_.”

“Another body?”

Alex’s silence on the line is stifling. “ _Six_.”

Kara connects to the Wi-Fi and swipes away notifications. This morning’s news were about the bodies of six people found just outside Seattle, close to where the earlier ones were found. They still carry signs of a mugging—badly beaten, possessions gone, left on the side of the road. All colored or immigrants of some kind. Leslie’s firm, borderline emotionally detached reporting is commendable.

The district attorney gave a statement and not at all unexpectedly, she was name-dropped by a reporter on the scene. “Does this mean there was some truth to Kara Danvers’ warnings, Mr Edge?”

Kara swears that while Morgan Edge did stand there smiling like the showman that he is, his eyes got just a little darker. “Kara Danvers is nothing more than a fearmongering conspiracy theorist,” he said, affecting amusement in his voice. Kara’s hand tightens around her phone. “What’s more, _thoroughly_ discredited. And just as responsible for all of this. This is the work of what I believe are nothing more than thugs that got the idea to make this seem like Cadmus work by none other than Ms Danvers herself. First inciting panic, now an inspiration to criminals. Last I heard she’s disappeared from the city. Good riddance. Let the real reporters like you stay and do the job, right?”

And thus explains the influx of Kara’s hateful notifications as of late.

She’s texting Alex an impassioned rant about what an ugly, evil bastard Morgan Edge is when the beer bottles are placed on her table. She looks up. Imra is smiling at her. _In the Air Tonight_ backdrops her entire existence in the restaurant. Standing by Kara’s table, one hand clamped around the edge, the other around the bottle necks, smiling like she’s keeping a secret that could undo Kara’s whole world if she so pleases to say it. Kara’s mouth works.

“On the house,” Imra supplies as she straightens, hands clasped at her front. “For your help this morning.”

Kara blinks. She sends whatever it is she’s already typed out to Alex and sets her phone down. Four half-liter bottles, frosted and dripping with precipitation, already uncapped. “I usually go for scotch or wine,” she says teasingly.

“So I’ve been told.” Imra returns the teasing. An ember comes alive in Kara’s belly. “But I thought, who would be crazy enough to turn down free beer?”

“Not me.” Kara picks up one bottle and just holds it in her hands for a second. Imra still hasn’t left—Kara chugs a _long_ swig down for courage. “What do I have to carry to get your company for an evening?”

Kara is deliberately, obviously, desperately not looking at Imra now. Imra doesn’t answer. Kara wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and is psyching herself up for another drink, when Imra slides into the seat across from her. Kara’s next breath escapes her.

Imra doesn’t say anything. Just picks up one of the bottles, brings it to her mouth, and takes a deep drink. Kara commits every bounce of her throat to memory.

“You’re not usually around in the evenings,” she starts off. Imra shrugs.

“I knew you’d be here tonight and thought of a way to thank you,” she says easily. Her knuckle knocks dully on one bottle. “There’s plenty more freezing in the back, thanks to you. So don’t be shy and ask the owner if you want more.”

That gets a full laugh out of Kara. Imra grins, tilts her bottle for a toast, and Kara knocks their bottles together.

“Where’s Mike?” Kara asks as casually as she could. “Does he take… evenings off, too, or…”

“You ask about Mike quite a bit, don’t you?” Kara blanches. Imra smirks and tilts her head for a quick drink. “Brainy told me you asked him, too.”

“Well, he _is_ your husband…”

“And?”

Imra’s looking at her with something like a dare sitting thick and shiny in her eyes, like molasses. It kills Kara. Absolutely murders her, and she just sits there for a few seconds undoing a trap that’s inches from being sprung.

“I don’t wanna be dumb and overstep my bounds,” Kara says quietly. “Ask you things, and stuff.”

Imra regards Kara with quiet fascination, a gentle smile playing on her lips. She tilts her bottle back and forth. Rights it, lifting it to drink. Kara does the same. And when Imra leans forward, elbows finding the tabletop, Kara mirrors that, too. The trap has sprung. Phil Collins croons _well I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh lord._

“Ask me things,” Imra whispers. Up close, Kara sees her eyes aren’t as dark as she first thought—they’re gray in the right light, steely, made stark to Kara’s eyes now in this proximity. What else can Kara find out this close? 

Right now, Kara really looks at Imra. She’s so much more. Little details that mean something. Little quirks that speak differently from her mouth. She’s the end of the rainbow waiting to be found. Her chest is a chest of secrets (secrets kept, for a reason) and Kara wants to remove her sweater, touch her ribs, know the things she thinks about when she’s up there in her lighthouse—the things she wants to stop thinking about, so she goes to the lighthouse.

Kara doesn’t waver. She steps into this, and not one atom of her being pounds with doubt. She shows Imra her hand: “why don’t you wear your wedding ring?”

Imra slowly, ever so slowly, leans back. She blinks. Her smile spreads just as slowly, but beautifully. Kara leans back, and waits.


	3. all our bodies

There’s the loveliest shade of red on Imra’s cheeks—beer-flushed, bold like raspberries. The windows are open and Imra’s arms are curled on the sill, chin resting on the crook of her elbow. Her hair whips wild and free. It’s taking everything for Kara to keep her eyes on the road and not end up killing them both in a freak car accident.

Kara drives with her arm out the window and a more this-generation pop song playing on the radio. The town passes them in blurs of monochrome and faint gold from the car’s headlights, spectral and almost too much like a fever dream, really. But the bounce of a rock under the wheel, the strands of hair sticking to her glasses, the warmth that radiates from Imra as she leans in to change stations, all tell her it’s real. A stop sign at an intersection gives some leeway for a glance and Imra meets her eyes when she does. Imra’s eyes crinkle: this is real.

Ten minutes takes too long and Kara feels like she’s lost a day when she stops the car. Imra rolls the window up and climbs out. A cursory glance at the dash tells Kara it’s close to midnight.

“Won’t Mike be wondering where you are?” she ventures as she clambers out. Imra is watching her. A small smile lifts her cheeks and Kara remembers how she looked here weeks ago, under a full moon, all light clashing with shadow and boundaries the both of them had dared slide their toes across. Kara’s head spins just imagining that moment again. Has it really only been two months since she got here? 

“He probably doesn’t even know I left.” Imra shrugs. She must see Kara’s face scrunch because she says more, but not before jerking her chin towards the lighthouse. They walk. “I sleep in Brainy’s room. Brainy sleeps on a futon in ours.”

Kara’s brows rise. “What?”

“I can’t stand it.” And Imra shrugs again like this is the simplest, smallest thing, but Kara catches a muscle spasm on her cheek. “Being near him for longer than necessary. Brainy understood.”

“How long have you been sleeping in separate rooms?”

At the lighthouse, Imra gets the door open with a click and a measured shove. It’s rusted and everything—it needs a very particular exertion of force to get it to open, she’s told Kara once. She walks into the darkness and Kara follows her, door ajar behind them. A sliver of light creeps through the gap, splays on the spiral staircase and several swirls of graffiti. Imra speaks with her face forward. “Since I filed for divorce.”

Kara lets herself take a couple of steps before replying. “It was that… vegetable girl, wasn’t it? What’s her name again?”

“Eve. Teschmacher. Her father has a stall at the farmers’ market in Hillsboro.”

“Was it her?”

Imra says nothing yet. She climbs to the very top and shoves open the door there in much the same way she did the first time—with a grunt, with the whole of her weight, with the ugly, rusty creak of the hinges.

Cold air slaps at Kara’s face as she steps out after Imra. She stares out at the sea, spread out like a rippling, iridescent canopy. “It was,” Imra says finally. Her smile is sad. Kara wants to reach out, touch her hand, or cup the jut of her jaw: feel Imra’s skin on her hand, take some of Imra’s sadness in her bones. “I didn’t think anything of it when he used to go out to pick produce up a lot more often than I needed him to. Thought he was just doing it in earnest.” She shrugs. “My own fault.”

“You shouldn’t ever think something like that’s your fault. All of it’s on him,” Kara mutters.

“I suppose,” Imra acquiesces. “But—have it happen to you enough times and you start to think something’s wrong with _you_ , you know? It’s because of something about you that it keeps happening.”

“It could also be because you wouldn’t stop giving him chances and he knew it.”

Imra laughs. A full one that makes pride swell in Kara’s chest and bravery come to her hand unbidden. It reaches out, that hand. Rests a scant, terrible inch from Imra’s on the railing. If Imra notices, she definitely doesn’t let on. “It could be that, too. Do you think I’m an idiot?”

Kara nibbles the inside of her lip and tips Imra a crooked smile when their eyes meet. “Honestly?” Imra’s brows quirk, prompting. “You should’ve put an end to it after the first time. Or the second.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

Kara purses her lips and runs her tongue across her front teeth. She tries again. “I think… you loved him too much.”

“Is that a euphemism?” Imra quips, and Kara chuckles. “Aren’t reporters barred from using euphemisms? Not entirely truthful and all that.”

“To be fair, I’m not a reporter anymore.” Kara ducks down to rest her chin on her forearm. Her other hand stays where it is on the railing, close to Imra’s. A brave or a stupid or both kind of close, she hasn’t decided yet. “And besides, that doesn’t… automatically make you an idiot. At least I don’t think so.”

Imra moves. The side of her hand brushes Kara’s and Kara feels her own elbow twitch. “Would you have done the same thing I did, then?”

“Huh?”

“Give so many chances,” Imra says, “that you run out of it for yourself?”

Kara’s wristwatch beeps—12 midnight. She thinks about it. Imra, catching Mike cheating once, twice, three times. Imra, always given the same sobbing apologies and honey-laden promises of _it’ll be different, this time_. Her wounded heart and her calloused palms in Mike’s hands. Their marriage that they hoped to save in seaside nowhere, miles from the life they’ve built and known. Would Kara give that kind of dedication to something, someone, Imra asks.

“Probably,” she murmurs. Imra smiles at that. “I got fired from my job and escaped here. You can tell I’m not exactly the brightest.”

The smile turns to a low laugh, and Kara, grinning along, still refuses to pull back her hand. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re brave for doing what you did,” Imra says.

“There’s like, a super thin line between bravery and stupidity.”

“Oh, I know. Take what I said as a euphemism.”

They laugh more there. High up in the lighthouse, wind brushing their earlobes and a moonless night overhead. The sea still feels like it could consume Kara. Show her its depths and strengths, just she reach out, but she doesn’t. Because she says something that happens to be funny, and Imra throws her head back and laughs, and she touches Kara’s hand on the railing. Her fingers rest on Kara’s own.

 

Kara stumbles into this new side of their relationship with all the grace of Bambi on ice. Granted, not much has changed. They still talk about anything, something, nothing, Kara still feels herself pink whenever Imra says something too sweet, and Imra is still Imra, warm and kind and friendly.

Only, when before they didn’t touch, Imra lets her fingers brush the top of Kara’s hand now. Or squeeze Kara’s shoulder, or Kara’s hip when Kara says something particularly amusing. She even lets her pinky finger swipe the corner of Kara’s mouth one time, muttering something along the lines of _eating spaghetti like a child_. It’s normal, it’s _nothing_ certainly, and Kara feels stupid whenever she spends an hour too long thinking about it some nights.

She takes it all in stride as best as she could. She thinks about Seattle, Alex, her emails. She thinks about the lighthouse and Imra’s mouth, and Imra’s hair that Imra now brushes away from her jaw as she chomps down a bite of steak. It’s black like the sea at night. All depths, strengths, secrets fathoms under, and Kara wants so badly to reach out.

“Are you sure you don’t want a bite?” Imra asks once she’s swallowed her mouthful. She wipes her mouth with the pad of her thumb and waits for Kara to respond with attentive eyes. Kara fidgets.

“I’ve eaten,” she says. “And that’s yours. I’m fine.”

“I’ve heard from the servers you go for double orders sometimes, so I’m just making sure.” Kara sputters. Imra just smirks. “I can’t finish this on my own, you know.”

“Then don’t. And maybe tell them to give you smaller servings next time or something.”

Imra shrugs and works on slicing another chunk. “I don’t know. It’d just make me feel a little better if you actually eat with me instead of just standing there and watching me eat.”

“Eat faster then.” Kara bites her lip. Does something brave, something stupid, and raises her brows at Imra. “Is that an invitation for us to start eating lunch together?”

Imra’s brow jumps, but she smiles. “I can’t leave my post, you know that.”

“The solution to that is _so_ easy.”

The next day finds Kara with Imra at the check-in booth, her lunch in the restaurant’s quaint cardboard takeout packs. The lunch special is fried chicken with a generous side of mashed potatoes and Kara peels open her gravy cup to pour onto everything. Imra watches her all the while. Bewildered, bemused— _endeared_ , Kara dares to think.

“You can come here,” Imra offers, waving to her side of the booth. In there she has a high stool she hops out of as she talks. “I can go fetch another chair from inside.”

“I’m fine, don’t worry.” Kara shakes her head and stuffs her face with mashed potatoes. Imra hasn’t touched her meal and just watches, and Kara wrinkles her nose at the dopey look on her face. She raises her brows at Imra in question.

“It’s uncomfortable to eat standing,” Imra insists.

“Believe me, I’ve eaten in more trying situations.”

Snorting, Imra slides her plate closer to Kara’s meal, picks up a drumstick, and starts to talk about something Kara is only able to half-register because Mike has slunk into the check-in booth, head swiveling between the two of them. It doesn’t swivel very hard, though—she and Imra are hunkered close. Kara watches him remove his apron and zero in on Imra with intention.

He tries for a greeting, a casual-sounding “is the chicken any good?” Imra regards him only for a second and shrugs one shoulder, tipping him a quick _it’s great_ before going back to Kara. Kara meets Mike’s gaze and there’s something there, hard and questioning. He smiles at her regardless, a tight one that is gone as soon as he flashes it because he turns away.

* * *

 

Kara connects to the Wi-Fi at least once a day to browse the news and swipe past hateful notifications that dwindle as the weeks pass. She watches the news sometimes on the TV in her room too, getting cookie crumbs on the sheets and wiggling her socked toes. Alex still calls for sure, checking on her and giving the same old updates because since the big six-corpse drop before, there hasn’t been any progress.

“Morgan Edge said it’s just gang violence.”

“ _These were done too cleanly for gang violence_ ,” Alex rasps. Kara imagines her sister’s breath smelling of coffee, sprawled on her chair, eyes closed tight. “ _But we’re not ruling anything out_.”

Kara mutes the TV and climbs out of bed to look out the window. Crumbs and a cracker box tumble off her lap. She pulls the curtain aside. “How about that Cadmus direction? Anything there?”

“ _Other than that the victims so far have been immigrants or… people of color, nothing solid to link them to this yet_.” Kara hears paper rustling on the line. Out the window, the sky is gray. The clouds are soupy-looking and are the kind that might let loose some rain later tonight if not any second now. She squints. “ _It’s getting frustrating, actually_.”

“Hey,” Kara coos. Alex sighs. “Why not clock out early today? Go be with Sam and Ruby.”

“ _Sam’s got a work thing with Lena. I don’t think Ruby’s home from school yet_.”

“All the better. You got the house to yourself so like,” Kara drops the curtain and waves her hand in a wild gesture, “just rest.”

“ _I have to get_ somewhere _with this_.”

“And _will you_ if you stay there just brooding tiredly at your desk?”

Silence. Kara hears a faint _thwip_ of paper. Alex probably closing her files and surrendering. “ _No_.” She sighs. Continues grimly, “ _probably not until another body shows up_.”

Kara chews her lip and frowns. “You’ll get somewhere soon. I promise.”

“ _How do you know that?_ ”

“Because you’re badass.” Alex snorts. Kara smiles. “And you’re smart, and I know you won’t let these guys get away with this.”

Something clicks on the line, and then the faint grind of what Kara figures is Alex’s chair sliding as she stands up. Alex’s voice is soft when she speaks again. “ _Thanks, Kar._ ” Softer, “ _won’t you come home yet?_ ”

“Do they still low-key hate you and high-key hate me there at the station?”

Alex is quiet. Kara laughs, and even Alex can probably tell how self-deprecating it sounds because she says, “ _I’m sorry I couldn’t help you out with this one_.”

Kara pads back to her bed and flops on it with a heavy sigh. “It’s fine, Alex. I don’t expect you to. This is my mess.”

“ _How are things there then?_ ”

“Good,” Kara says. Alex waits—of course by things she means something specific. “Imra and I are okay.”

“ _You know it won’t end well, right?_ ”

Kara bites her lip. She still remembers how quiet Alex had been when she told her about it—Imra, Mike, Eve, the divorce. Still remembers how slowly Alex told her _don’t get your hopes up_ , and how determinedly she lied through the skin of her teeth and told Alex no, she’s not hoping at all. She’d pounded back her fill of scotch in a heartbeat. “I’m going for a run. Gotta get going before it rains.”

“ _Alright_.” Kara hears the beep of a car, the slam of a door, Alex’s slow breathing on the line. Her thumb inches toward the power button of her phone, restless and pathetic. “ _Call me anytime, okay? Love you.”_

“Love you too.”

 

It’s no surprise at all that Kara’s legs take her to follow the route she and Imra took nights ago to the lighthouse. Wind on their faces, arms out the window, just a tiny bit loose, a little bit tipsy. She runs in the middle of the road, the same corny pop song playing in her earbuds and the same sights passing her eyes. She passes Lenny’s, the suburban quarter, the trailer park, and when she gets to the intersection with the stop sign she stops to catch her breath. Glances to the side like she did nights ago and pictures Imra there.

A car honks behind her and she veers sideways to let it pass, but rushes right back to the middle. The streets get more desolate the farther she gets into the town. She sees the diner, alive with lights and the hubbub of people grabbing dinner and truckers stepping out for another long, cross-country drive. Beyond it, the beach, roads that fade to gravel, and silence.

The climb to the lighthouse is still the same chest-burning experience as the first time. Getting into the lighthouse itself and climbing to the very top is at least easier. She’s stronger than Imra, this much she’s sure of, and while the hinges creak, she doesn’t grunt. She pushes it all the way open.

She breathes in the sea, weight draped on the railing, eyes closed. The smell of salt sits heavy at the back of her tongue and the heave of her own breathing joins the sound of her heartbeat. A voice in her head that sounds a lot like Alex says _don’t get your hopes up_ but she stays there anyway, hoping against hope a truck will come rumbling down below and the door will open up behind her.

It rains hard about an hour later on her run back. Her running digs are soaked clean through and her hair is a wet, loose mess, sticking to her cheeks and dripping everywhere. She tracks mud inside the inn and shivers, already bumbling a chatter-teeth apology, but Imra is hearing none of it.

Dressed comfy and off-duty, Imra flinches. Whatever she’d been telling Brainy is forgotten in her rush to grab a towel from some cupboard in the corner. A towel she throws over Kara’s shoulders, lips pursed and brows furrowed. “Sorry about the mud. Sorry,” Kara stammers, teeth chattering still, and she’s given a pointed look.

“You’re gonna get ill,” Imra mutters. Kara’s only response is to laugh a sheepish, shuddering laugh. “Didn’t you watch the weather report? Or see the clouds? Even I didn’t go out.”

Oh. “I thought I could make it back in time.” Kara stands there, toeing at the floorboards like a child scolded while Imra shakes her head and asks for Brainy to bring another towel. This one, Imra uses for Kara’s head.

“I can do it,” Kara murmurs. Her voice is small. Shy and flustered and small. Imra pauses from drying Kara’s hair and steps back, picking at her fingers while Kara carries on herself.

“You can keep those,” Imra says when Kara offers the towels back after. She does snatch one though, and drapes it again around Kara’s shoulders. “Have you had dinner?”

“Uh. No. Not yet.”

“Special’s potato casserole with sliders,” Imra supplies. Kara doesn’t know what to do with that information, dripping and shivering as she is. She lets Imra pick up for her. “Go get changed.”

Halfway through dressing up to head back downstairs for dinner, Kara gets a knock on her door. She opens it to a friendly-looking boy holding up a plastic bag of takeout packs from the restaurant. He wishes her a good evening and her, she changes into pajamas and eats dinner in bed, watching some superhero show on the TV, ignoring that nagging voice in her head telling her not to get her hopes up.

* * *

 

Kara knows enough now to not expect Imra at the check-in booth when she heads there for the week’s payment. Marriage counseling sessions, she’d told Kara, at least twice a month for six months. “At first he contested the division of property,” Imra said, wading her spoon through her grilled corn salad. Kara had stopped flicking through the pages of Imra’s book (Fernando Pessoa, _A Little Larger Than the Universe_ ) to listen intently. “So I doubled back and just demanded for most of our liquid assets instead to make things easier. Let him have the whole of the inn and the restaurant. But he still wouldn’t let up.

“Maybe he realized then that I don’t really care about who gets what.” Imra shrugged. “So he asked for something else. Marriage counseling. To see if we can salvage things.”

Kara’s brows had furrowed, and she shut the book completely to gape at Imra. “What?”

“I… agreed, so the court allowed it. He asked for six months at the very least. And I told him…” Imra smiled at Kara, too low on the corners and too sad around the eyes. “Once it’s done and there really is nothing anymore, we’d go through with it.”

“But this place is yours, too. You bought it with him, didn’t you?”

“Honestly, Kara? I just can’t wait to leave all of this behind me.”

She delivers the check in tights and a hoodie she means to run in right after. Brainy receives it with a distracted mutter of _thank you for your patronage_ and a half a second glance away from his book. Statistics and probability, Kara sees when she leans forward. She remembers the graphs and lines of formulae from college.

“Imra isn’t here,” Brainy says without looking up. Thank goodness he doesn’t, because Kara pinks and leans back with a clear of her throat.

“I know.” Brainy’s eyes flick up. “I just—I see you’re reading again.”

“There’s not much to do here in check-in.” He shrugs and closes his book, but keeps his fingers on the page he had been reading. Kara can’t help but sense she’s being sized up, dissected, analyzed like an equation when he stares at her. Brainy makes her feel like he could read her like she’s a book written entirely in size 14 font and bold letters—she doesn’t want to think about how well he could, if ever. “And visitors don’t tend to hang around to chat when it’s me here.”

Kara can see why but that’s not something she wants to say out loud. She clears her throat. “How are your applications?”

Brainy shrugs and looks away. “I’ve been thinking of just enrolling at the community college. Take up something more practical. The better to help Imra with.”

“Your dream, though?”

For once, Brainy looks like he doesn’t know what to say. Kara watches him open his mouth and close it, three times in slow succession, before giving up and just going for a shrug. “This is better than heading nowhere.”

Kara’s frowns. “Are you okay?” her mouth asks before she can stop it.

Brainy’s surprise shows for only a moment. And then his expression softens, and Kara is gifted her very first smile. Small as it may be, it is one. He nods at her in answer and actually bids her goodbye when she leaves for her run.

 

“He told me, yes.”

Kara cuts off a sizeable chunk of the fish to fit into her mouth. She doesn’t even try to swallow it before answering. Imra’s shown long ago she doesn’t mind that kind of thing, or at least with Kara. In fact, she always smiles a little bit at the sight like the way she does now. “What’d you say?”

Imra pokes her fish with her fork. She tilts her head, rests her cheek on her palm. “No way in hell.”

Kara tries not to sputter and is met with half success. She spits tiny fish bits at the floor. Imra is smirking at her when she turns back. “He seemed pretty… sure of his choice to me.”

“He is,” Imra says quietly. “Brainy never decides on anything unless he’s absolutely sure of it.”

“Even when it’s not what he wants?”

“If it’s the most rational thing to do, mhm.”

Kara goes for another bite of her fish. When Imra, poking and prodding hers, shows no signs of meaning to do the same, she urges her with a raised brow. Imra obliges. “I wish I could help somehow,” Kara mutters.

“That we’re here for him will have to be enough,” Imra says with a weak smile and a prudent mouthful of fish. “I think the things going on in _my_ life helped influenced his decision.”

“What, the divorce?”

“He’s told me he won’t stay once Mike has the place,” Imra says. She’s gone back to pushing her battered fish around with her utensil. “And selfishly enough, I’m thankful he feels that way. It’d be nice to have him around afterwards. But then I suppose he also thinks he’ll have to help make money some other way once we aren’t here.”

Kara processes that. She holds her tongue on a good number of things she thinks to say. Things that include herself, and helping out, and hoping for things once the divorce is settled. She asks instead, “where are you gonna go?”

Behind Kara, the door opens and the mailman’s jovial greeting of _good day_ makes Imra’s face brighten just enough to seem welcoming. “I don’t know yet,” she takes the time to say before smiling meaningfully at Kara, a silent excusing. Kara moves to leave once the usual weather comment drops, but Imra pins her with a sunny, “oh, have you met Kara?”

“I was wondering when you’d introduce me to your pretty friend,” the mailman says, taking off his cap. Bashful, Kara laughs. Imra grins, and to Kara’s eyes she seems almost brimming with pride.

* * *

 

Mike comes up to her room alone once because Kara’s heater is busted again. His toolbox rattles with contents and his biceps bunch up with the effort of pulling off the heater’s front plate. It’s too early in the day to be smelling of food and the greasy musk of the kitchens. When Kara inhales, she smells soap, a bit of lotion, some product on his hair. She promptly steps away.

“We’ve been meaning to buy replacements but things have been kind of stressful,” he tells Kara while he works. Kara can imagine. Stressful is one word for it. “Sorry about this.”

“That’s alright. It was working alright until last night. I cranked it up a little higher.” Kara rubs the back of her neck. “So, yeah, sorry about that.”

“Nah, you’re supposed to be able to crank it up as high as you want. Last night _was_ pretty cold, wasn’t it?” He must do something wrong, Kara doesn’t see, but whatever it is there’s a loud _clang_ and he swears under his breath. “It’s kind of how the weather is around here. Only gets colder before it gets warm.”

“Mm, yeah.” And then because she couldn’t resist, “a lot of the conversations here revolve around the weather, don’t they?” Mike laughs. It’s a disarming sound, charming and full. Kara imagines him laughing that same laugh with some girl who isn’t Imra and thus begins the beginning. “Can I get you anything while you work?”

“Water if that’s alright?”

“Sure.” Kara heads to the kitchenette and opens the fridge. She has to reach past packs of leftover junk food and a half-eaten McDonald’s takeout to get to the water bottles. When she turns back, Mike is watching her. Intently enough that she involuntarily freezes.

“You look like a nice person,” he says. His fingers toy with the screwdriver in his hand. “Imra really seems to like you.”

Kara fidgets. “Thanks.”

“She doesn’t wear the ring, but she’s still my wife.”

“I know.” Kara remembers how to walk. Four strides and she’s next to Mike, breathing in his scent, stark and stinging to her nose now that she’s hyperaware of it. She keeps her gaze averted when she hands the water over and when he takes it.

“I’m kind of doing everything I can to make it stay that way.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want it to stay that way anymore.”

Mike’s eyes have taken on a certain hardness when Kara meets them again. His lips are pursed and she can see his chin rippling with gritted teeth. The screwdriver turns over and over in his hand as he plays with it. Adjusting her glasses, Kara professes, “I should just leave you to it,” and leaves the room. The tension stays wrapped around her neck like a shawl even as she steps out of the inn, inhaling fresh air.

 

“Are you alright?”

Kara’s been on the receiving end of Imra’s tenderness for a while now. A months long, since she got here kind of while. Hearing it in moments both she expects and doesn’t still throws her off though, makes her breath come slower and as of recently, brings up Alex’s voice in her head saying _don’t get your hopes up_. She blinks. Now, sure enough, she feels her arms and legs do that thing where they turn a little bit weak and hears _don’t get your hopes up_ in some nook of her brain. She smiles.

“Yeah.” She goes back to her food. “Just a little preoccupied, sorry.”

“Are things okay? Is it something at Seattle?”

Kara nods her head and winds her fingers tighter around her utensil when Imra reaches to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. Imra’s fingers jostle her glasses a little. Kara adjusts them accordingly. She clears her throat. “You could say that. Yeah. Alex has been working hard.”

Imra’s utensils click on her plate. “Has there—there haven’t been any new developments, have there? I saw the news before about the bodies. Six?”

“Six.”

“Mm.” Imra nods. Her brow furrows. “Do you really think it’s Cadmus, Kara?”

“I do,” Kara says with conviction. Had she some otherworldly strength, she’d have bent her spoon on half but as it is, she just grips it a little tighter. Her mind goes to her blog briefly, the riot, her sister’s bruise. “They’re the only ones I can think of that would go this far. And they have a thing against immigrants, don’t they?”

“Do you think they’ll be stopped?”

“I do,” comes the answer with the same conviction. At this, Imra smiles, and Kara pulls her head up a little higher to return it. “I just. Wish they do a little faster.”

“So you can go home,” Imra quips, and Kara chuckles.

“That’s only secondary,” she says. Imra smiles and reaches for Kara’s hand, resting her own on top.

The touching, it came with the change in dynamics. Like something had been between them before and now they can reach for each other freely. This, it’s easier than the guarded interactions before of not knowing where to place herself. Kara lives to touch people, feel their warmth, to know that their bodies are the same and what blood runs through hers runs through others. To be comforted by the knowledge that with the same bodies must also mean the same goodness in there, somewhere, in their chests just like in Kara’s.

Alex has always called her dumb for being one of the few who believe in those—goodness, and hope. It’s her voice in Kara’s head now, speaking like a broken record when Kara turns her hand over. Imra’s fingertips are four spots of embers on her palm. Her fingers are wonderfully, beautifully bare, and Alex’s voice rises to the point of yelling.

“I think we both need a break, mm?” Imra says, not pulling her hand back. “I don’t think the weather reports said anything about rain tomorrow. We can go to the marina?”

“The marina?”

“Get on a boat. A picnic?” Imra looks to ponder it for a while before grinning with decision. “I haven’t been in one in a while. Do you want to?”

Of course Kara does. The next morning is Brainy writing the specials and manning the check-in booth in Imra’s place. Mike, in his apron, chin twitching, looks on at them as Imra walks out of the inn with Kara in tow.

They take Kara’s car for a reason neither of them say aloud and veer past Mike’s truck sitting just to the side of the gravel path. Imra’s cooler is in the trunk with a container of what’s to be their picnic. Imra had asked yesterday, what she wants to eat, what her favorite food is. “You might not believe me,” she’d told Imra with an elfin grin. Imra only cocked her head.

Afterwards, she leaned back to take in Kara’s physique, her broad shoulders, her legs, her arms Imra’s once seen. Kara had blushed just a little bit. “You’re right, I don’t believe you.”

Jiaozi, some pizza slices, fluffy-looking pastries Kara will have to ask Imra where she got from later: Kara sees them all when she takes a quick peek. The marina is as she remembers it. The boats, the water, the smell. Only now it’s just the two of them, not counting the disapproving presence of Alex in her head.

And, now, it’s not Mr Rodas on the boat but Maggie, regarding Kara with a stone-faced kind of silence when she comes up to the boat with Imra. “I still hate how my dad makes me watch the damn boat when he goes out of town,” she tells Imra as she helps her on. “It’s like I never grew older than sixteen. I have a job, Jesus.”

“You have a sixteen year-old’s height, to be fair.”

“Watch it, Ardeen.”

Maggie, though still uncomfortably stern-looking in the face, gets to helping Kara on next but Imra steps ahead of her. Imra offers her hands and clutches Kara’s tight when Kara takes them. If Maggie thinks anything of it, she doesn’t show it. Doesn’t show any either when Kara sits too close to Imra.

They don’t go too far. The boat is small and the currents are strong, but they’re far enough from land that the air smells different. Maggie is given some of the food and two cans of Coke from the cooler, and then she pulls her hat down, reclines on her seat, and kicks her feet up on the dash to nap.

Without the rumbling of the engine, Kara can hear the waves. Some seagulls passing overhead. Imra’s hushed murmur of the story she first came into town. People had been friendly to her, then. Taken, definitely, by both her and Mike, their picture perfect marriage to the outsider’s eye. Kara listens with her elbows on her thighs and Imra’s hip against her own. Imra shifts eventually. She rests her head on Kara’s shoulder and heaves a contented sigh, and Kara tries extra hard not to be her fidgety self lest she jostle Imra.

“How are things with Mike?” Kara asks some time after Imra’s story is done. Imra doesn’t shift at all. She takes it as an okay to go on. “The session go alright?”

“It was all the normal things. Try harder, find it in ourselves to change what needs to be changed. We didn’t talk on the drive there.”

“Is that unusual?”

“We talk usually, yes.” Imra lifts her head off of Kara’s shoulder and straightens. She sits with her knees close together, hands on her lap if not somewhere else. This is Imra, raised gentle and well-mannered. Hardworking too, from what Kara can gleam of the texture of her hands and the ease of which she helps run the inn. She imagines Imra in a simple home being taught to tuck her elbows in at the dining table, her chores on a list tacked to the fridge. Kara wants to know all about her childhood.

“What about?”

“Business,” Imra says, forearms finding her knees. Her fingers twine. “And then the occasional wheedling of not going through with the divorce. He talked about you on the drive back.”

Kara’s head turns very slowly. She sits there blinking and Imra shrugs some wordless confirmation, _yes he did_ , and continues. “He said you seemed nice. Settled into the inn well enough.” Imra fidgets a little here and looks at Kara’s cheek instead of her eyes. “Asked when you’re checking out, why you’re here.”

Kara thinks of Mike, and of how the things atop her dresser looked a little sideways when she went back the day he fixed her heater. There were only pictures there, small framed ones of Alex, Sam, Ruby, her friends. She thinks of the look on his face on the topic of Imra. “What did you say?”

“That it’s none of our business. And that I’m glad you’re checked in with us.”

Imra stands. Kara follows her when she ambles to the edge of the boat, hands grasping the rail while she looks out at the sea. Kara loves the wind here. It’s cold but not often biting, and the way it cards through Imra’s hair to set it just a couple locks unkempt is incredible. Her hand is reaching out to set some back in place before she can properly register what she’s doing. Imra looks at her and her eyes are the same thoughtful, gray things as the night at the restaurant so many nights ago.

“I _am_ glad you’re checked in with us.”

“Indefinite stays good for business?” Kara smirks. Imra laughs.

“Just glad to have met you is all, Kara.”

Warmth flares under Kara’s palm when she lays her hand on top of Imra’s. She feels Imra’s hand twitch the smallest bit as if poked, or shocked, or scorched. Imra doesn’t pull away, though. “Yeah. Me too.”

“Glad to have met yourself?” Imra chirps with a rumble of childish laughter, her nostrils flaring. This, all this, Imra’s carefree laugh and Kara’s bumbling correction, their hands linked, fingers fitting into the other’s gaps, it’s casual and intimate. It means nothing and something. It’s too much. Kara pops.

She leans in. Imra—and Kara sees her face, alarmed, flushing—turns her face away. Kara freezes. All of her, from the top of her head to the ends of her toes. She pulls back as if shoved.

“I—I’m sorry, I don’t know what I…”

Imra doesn’t let her finish. She cups one side of Kara’s jaw and presses the softest kiss to her cheek. Kara feels lightheaded. Her face burns with shame, humiliation, tenderness. With too much.

“I’ll wake up Maggie,” Imra says quietly. Her hand lingers on Kara’s jaw for a moment before she pulls back. The trip back to the inn is crowned with silence.

* * *

 

Kara takes that as a sign that Alex is right ( _don’t get your hopes up_ ) and keeps her distance, falling away from the routine she and Imra have put together in favor of a new one. This one involves a lot of staying in, a bit of going out, the latter mostly only to fetch meals in takeout packs or to squirrel some groceries she can just cook in her room. She sees Imra only once in the following days. On that once, Imra calls her over to share lunch and she churns out her best-sounding “I’m sorry, I have to go somewhere.”

She makes the week’s payment in the evening, to Brainy. He takes the check without looking at it and just stares at Kara studiously. “Thank you for your patronage,” he says, almost robotic. Kara spies the door behind him start to open. She slips away.

She slips away again when, one time during lunch, she sees Imra eating in the restaurant at a table with a full view of the door. Imra doesn’t see her and for the first time since coming here, Kara thanks small town people and small town talks. She’s long gone by the time the old lady leaves Imra’s table. Lunch is instant ramen eaten in bed. Sleep is scarce and showers are long, shameful thoughts of lips and calloused hands.

“ _You sound antsy_.”

“I do?” Kara wrinkles her nose and smushes a hand down her mouth. She adjusts her glasses. “I think I sound fine.”

“ _I know how fine-Kara sounds, Kara. This is not-fine-Kara_.”

“You try hiding out in the middle of nowhere waiting for the mess you started to die down.”

“ _I’m too busy being the cops’ spouse and being called in regularly to tell them everything about my day, sadly._ ” There’s no venom in Lena’s voice, no, just good old dry humor, but Kara’s cheeks still warm. “ _We should switch places_.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“ _Oh hush, I know you didn’t_.” Lena chuckles. “ _I’m just saying, we both have been having a pretty hard time since my mother decided to resurface so here we are_.”

Kara prods at a lump of raised earth on the ground with her foot. The gravel eats up the toe of her shoe with a wet crunch. She inhales the same wetness in the air when she breathes and steps farther away from The Legionnaire’s front doors. “How are you holding up on that? Snapper isn’t too hard on you, is he?” A quick pause. “ _Alex_ isn’t, is she?”

“ _Alex is my friend, it’s fine. I understand the methods_.” Kara mutters _that’s not very comforting_ and Lena tacks on with a low chuckle. “ _I’ve been very cooperative. I’ve handed over all that they asked for, even all my communications. Just in case Lillian tries to reach out._ ”

“Lena…”

“ _I know_.” Kara hears paper crumpling. Imagines Lena writing some official business thing down only to end up scribbling whatever it is that’s bothering her in long repetitions with a late realization. With all her poise and intellectual prowess, Lena is still human. “ _Kara—I. Would rather not talk about that right now. I’m not in the right headspace_.”

“Of course.” Kara nods to no one. “Sorry. Yeah. I get it.”

Lena mutters a quiet thank you and takes a second to breathe, fill her lungs with composure. When she talks again, Kara can hear the lilts of a smile. “ _What about you? Wait, little bird told me you’re enjoying your stay away from the city._ ”

“Little bird as in Sam?”

“ _Little bird as in little bird who has seen the object of this enjoyment of yours,_ ” Lena says breezily. Kara groans. “ _Now now, you understand we just worry about you_.”

Kara kicks at a rock petulantly. “It isn’t anything to be worried about.”

“ _You’re wounded and lonely and there happens to be a very pretty, very married individual in your orbit who, for reasons already revealed to you, doesn’t wear a ring. Plot twist_.”

“I’d like a talk with your little bird, if she’s there.” There’s a distant snort and the vague sound of Lena’s finger jabbing at her phone. Kara flushes. “Wait—I’m on _speaker?_ ”

“ _Was_ ,” Lena guffaws unapologetically. “ _Sorry, I was doing something but now my hands are free. You were saying?_ ”

“It’s nothing to be worried about.”

“ _It’s quite the thing to be worried about if_ you’re _saying it’s nothing to be worried about_.” Kara says nothing. Lena is quiet on the line too, and she must realize she won’t get a response because she huffs. “ _At least she’s nothing like Leslie from what I’ve heard_.”

Kara sighs. Quietly, she glances over her shoulder at the inn. She pictures Imra behind the counter completely casual, unchanged and unfazed by the day of their picnic. “She’s incredible.”

“ _Oh, Kara…_ ” Lena murmurs, in much the same tone as Alex’s _don’t get your hopes_ _up_. Kara closes her eyes and sighs again. “ _Do you want to…?_ ”

“I’d rather not talk about it, to be honest. Not the right headspace.”

Lena laughs, hushed and sympathetic. Kara smiles to no one. “ _Alright. You’ll call?_ ”

“Soon, promise.”

“ _Tell me if I can help you with anything, okay? Anything._ ”

“Thanks, Lena.” Kara makes to end the call. _Stops_ , when her screen lights up and she’s reminded of her dearest friend’s name on the displayed contact. “ _Actually_ ,” she blurts, slapping the phone back to her ear so quickly she winces. Lena Luthor hums. “I’m—you went to MIT, right?”

Pause. Slowly, bemusedly, Lena replies, “ _I did_.” Kara sucks a breath through her teeth.

* * *

 

The notice about the thunderstorm gets tacked to the check-in counter and the hallways, close to the stairs. Kara takes it as a normal thing around here judging by how the staff go about their businesses easily even with the sky getting dark and heavy above them. This place is so close to the sea—she thinks they should be more worried, but what does she know.

“Since you’re bringing it up, I’m thinking you’re imagining tsunamis, full wipeout and stuff?” says one of the restaurant’s servers Kara knows the name of as Julia. When Kara just blinks, Julia smiles kindly, shaking her head. “It won’t be anything like that. Just heavier than usual rain, some thunder, high tide down at the beach. The power will go out for sure, though. That’s what all the notices are for.”

“When’s the landfall, you think?”

Julia shrugs and serves Kara her meal. “Tomorrow, by the looks of things.”

Sure enough, tomorrow around evening it does. The rain falls reckless and angry and Kara is thankful she had her window fixed, entirely on accident as it may be. There’s only rippling blue-gray on her window when she pushes aside her curtain.

The signal cuts out first two hours later and she spends a good five minutes redialing Alex to disconnections. The power goes next. There’s a dragging minute of just the sounds of the rain, thunder, and the pads of her feet as she scrambles around for decent clothes before the lights come back on. The TV doesn’t, though. She opens her fridge and finds the interior dim, too.

The knock comes while she’s scanning the rest of the room for things that won’t turn on. Imra is standing outside when she opens it, dressed in a comfy evening outfit of a loose sweater and leggings. She smiles while Kara fumbles. “We’re checking on our guests. Everything okay?”

“Fine,” is all Kara can get out with her surprise. She fidgets and Imra’s smile falters, but she clears her throat to pick up. She gestures behind Kara.

“Can I come in? To do the check?”

“Right, sure. Of course.”

Kara closes the door after Imra. She jams her hands into the pockets of her sweatpants and watches as Imra paces around extra slow, caught taut between doing what she came to do and observing the room. Kara’s been here two months and she knows it shows. The sheets and the curtains are the same ones she came in to, but the dresser has the smaller picture frames she fit into one duffel. The single seat table in the kitchenette, she’s moved closer to the window. In the corner, the recliner is fit to collapse under a mix of clean clothes, dirty laundry, and the towels Imra lent her.

The smell: her perfume, her fabric softener, her shampoo. Her running hoodie that she’s suspended over the heater to let dry. Shoes poke out under the bed. Imra seems particularly taken by the fuzzy periwinkle socks jammed into one pair. Kara, pink, watches her push the running hoodie aside to test the heater.

“Our generator isn’t the best, so you might notice the fridge and the TV don’t work. Some outlets, too.” Imra adjusts the heater to an acceptable temperature and pivots to face Kara. Her face is inscrutable. “I’m certain the one by your bed works. For charging and other things.”

“Right.”

Imra nods. Her eyes wander the room again and stop on the picture frames. With all her gentleness, she picks one up, and Kara’s body warms at the upward quirk of her lips. “Your parents?”

Kara knows which one she’s looking at, just from that. “Adoptive. Yeah.”

“You never mentioned that…” Imra says with a strange kind of wonder. She puts the frame down to pick up another, and her smile widens, and Kara’s body reacts. This is all too much, just too much.

“What are you doing?”

Imra starts. She looks wildly between Kara and the pictures before putting the one she’s been holding back down. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. I...”

“No.” Kara shakes her head. Imra stands there with wide eyes. “I mean. What are you _doing?_ Here? With—in my room? Staying? Looking at…” Kara’s throat strains and she waves frantically at the pictures to finish her claim.

“I…” Imra fails. Staring at Kara, she clears her throat and tries again. “I don’t know. I. You’ve been avoiding me.”

Kara crosses her arms over her chest, like that’ll protect her from the why. It doesn’t. She feels the same hot flush of shame as they stand looking at each other. “I’m sorry.”

“I understand why you’d—”

“I meant about trying,” Kara swallows, “to…” She waves her hand, suddenly inarticulate again. That’s a shame for a reporter. Snapper would flip. Or he’d be perfectly smug, seeing as he stripped her of being one. “I just thought—you. I’m sorry.”

Imra doesn’t answer. Her fingers pick at each other and her eyes wander in her silence, only focusing on Kara again when she means to speak. She wets her lips first, and Kara snaps her eyes elsewhere. “I’m fond of you, Kara. More than I should be.”

The storm outside only picks up. A burst of thunder delays Kara’s response. All the better, because her voice comes out a lot less strained than before. “What does that mean?”

“I’ll show you.”

It takes Imra three strides to cross to where Kara is. She lifts her hands and furls them around either side of Kara’s face and those hands, her rough hands, feel like the heat of a supernova burning away the world around them, piecemeal, sounds before sights. Sensation doesn’t leave. She feels Imra’s lips and Imra’s tongue and closes her eyes, keening.

Her hands find Imra’s waist. Imra shudders against her, under her palms. When Kara pulls her closer she lets herself be pulled but parts their mouths with a small sound. To breathe. Kara, her senses returning to her in fragments, realizes she has to do that, too.

Imra’s eyes are gray, Kara knows this. But right now they’re dark, her pupils blown and eyelashes fluttering, her breathing crawling in and out through her mouth. Her flush is beautiful. Kara feels warmth on her own face.

“You’re incredible,” she hears herself murmur. Imra blinks slow and regards Kara with wide, doubtful eyes and the slightest wobble to her lip. Kara wants to kiss it to calm stillness. She twists her fingers into the loose fabric of Imra’s sweater and can feel the body heat radiating from underneath. She knows with that heat is the same human body, the same blood, the same marrow as her own: the same bundles of muscle and life and goodness as everyone. Holding Imra like this still feels like closing her fingers around a burning star.

“I’m still married,” Imra whispers, more breath than sound. “And once I’m not, I won’t have anything. You’d still want me?”

Kara cradles Imra’s cheek in her palm. She shows Imra. 


	4. beyond the gray

Kara has vivid dreams.

Which isn’t to say she’s a deep sleeper, though. Alex had always complained about her erratic tossing and turning the couple of times they’ve slept together in one bed as children. She doesn’t snore, _thank God_ said Alex, but she does other things.

She dreamed a lot, even then. Often woke up panting with her clothes sticking to her chest and sweat on her temples, Alex hovering above her with worried eyes. Cried, rarely, but she still did. The therapist Eliza and Jeremiah had gotten her said it was normal for a girl her age to be having dreams. _Perfectly normal_ for a girl with her trauma to be having _those_ dreams, dreams with her parents’ faces and snapshots of a plane on fire crashing into the sea. Not necessarily healthy, but—normal.

She’d grown out of the nightmares eventually and progressed to light, cautious, tiptoeing sleep. Leslie once slept through a break-in at the apartment below them and Kara had been the first to call the police, mumbling hurriedly on the phone as she listened out by the stairs. The burglar got in through the window with some duct tape and a hammer wrapped in sheets. Kara told the cops she was up writing drafts and knew the tenant below them was out for the weekend. Only one of those is true.

Her time as Cat Grant’s PA in CatCo didn’t much help with her sleeping habits. She thinks that’s one of the things that fascinated Cat, actually, how she’d pick up after two rings no matter the time of day. _Efficiency_ , Cat always said, _and suicide_. Kara’s body knows how to function on four, five hour sleeps and cups of latte—her body does _not_ know how to sleep without wine or scotch or something absolutely exhausting to drain her brain and body.

So she’s always up at 6 or 5 depending on how well the heater is functioning or what her dreams are. The heater is on 80° spewing 60 and she wakes up with cold feet, blinking away the last visions of dark hair and earthy skin from behind her eyes.

5:16am. Imra isn’t outside yet to write the specials. The ground is wet and the sky is gray with the leftover rain from the storm the night before. The rainfall is a marching band hum of snare drums. It might rain for the remainder of today, Imra did say last night.

Last night.

Imra had kissed her once. She’d kissed Imra twice, once to prove a point and the next because it felt good. It was _good._ Imra made sounds in Kara’s mouth and Kara took each one, swallowed them all until they were simmering between her thighs. Imra’s mouth was warm. Her hands warmer. The room hot but not because of the heater. Kara could remember how close they were to the bed. And Imra, gentle, sweet Imra, had pushed them apart with dark eyes, a shy smile, and tremors in her breathing. Kara took a long, long shower before going down for her scotch.

She doesn’t know what she’s expecting for the morning after but what she gets, what she gets is Imra joining her outside at around a quarter before 6 with an umbrella and a single cup of coffee in her hand. What she gets is a shy smile and the coffee and what could be a whisper of a kiss with how closely Imra chooses to stand when she offers the cup.

“Good morning.”

“Thanks—morning,” Kara says smilingly. Imra has gone out in the rain, moving the chalk board slate closer to the inn, under some shade. “How’d you know I like lattes?”

“Servers.” Imra winks. “I saw you through the window. You’re up awfully early.”

“The heater’s having some trouble again. My feet were cold.” Kara grins and flaps her hand dismissively when Imra pinks. “It’s fine, don’t worry about it. I’m used to getting up early anyway.”

“You’d think for someone on a break, you’d be sleeping in more,” Imra says. She dries the slate with a rag and looks at Kara sidelong. “I’ll have Mike come up to your room after breakfast. Or… would you rather I sent Brainy?”

Kara rolls her lips into her mouth. That’s still something to be considered—discussed? Confronted?—Mike. Imra had said so herself—she’s still married, technically. Kara knows this as well as she knows Imra has found herself a place in her heart and bones. Imra has stopped writing on the slate. She’s chewing her lip, waiting on Kara with wide eyes.

“Does it matter who you send?” Kara asks without looking. Imra’s writing hasn’t picked up yet.

“I’ll send someone up,” Imra says at length. Kara nods, and nods, and they spend their routine morning meet in silence.

* * *

 

Kara has two Safari windows open with no less than 5 tabs each. Both resized to fit her screen, one is active on a Periscope stream of a coverage at the police station, and the other is opened to an article that reads _posted 9 minutes ago_ below the headline. The TV is tuned to the news and Kara’s eyes dart from the anchor’s face, to the Periscope, to the article in practiced, fluid flicks.

“ _…in Seattle, found at 4 this morning at the cusp of the I-90…_ ”

“ _…and here we can see the chief of police now—chief! Chief, excuse me—_ ”

_...was called in by MsGrace Parker who was driving down the I-90 from…_

Kara’s on the fifth article (saying the same damn thing as the first four) and the news anchor’s long gone on the TV when her phone rings. She snatches it up while staring at the grayed out video of the ended Periscope live stream and answers with nary a glance at the caller’s name.

“ _Did you see the news?_ ”

“Yeah.” Kara puts the call on speaker to go hands-free, switching tabs and entering searches with lightning quick fingers. “Did Grace Parker say anything useful? She was the one who found them, right?”

“ _Yeah, she just got—_ ”

“Says here she’s a doctor. Been in practice for seven or so years. Did she have anything to say about the state of the bodies? How many were there?”

“— _out of interrogation,_ ” Alex finishes slowly. Her voice is raspy and Kara can easily picture her pinching the bridge of her nose. “ _You know I can’t tell you that kind of information._ ”

“I’m not a reporter right now, Alex,” Kara deadpans. She clicks through Twitter snapshots of the I-90 roadside swarming with police tape and civilian cars parked in the distance.

“ _Which makes you a civilian, and that’s kind of worse, isn’t it._ ”

“I shut down my blog—”

“ _Kara._ ” Kara tightens her jaw and opens tabs for two more searches: no other pictures of the scene, the same information on Grace Parker. A third search yields something useful. A Twitter update from a public profile saying _mugged(?) and killed, shame. CADMUS???_ “ _Relax_. _Breathe,_ ” Alex says.

“Alex. The bodies were the same as all the others you found before.” Kara’s fingers are shaking. She takes a long breath in through her mouth and it comes out in one belting, shrill demand: “why haven’t the police released this information?”

“ _Because—Kara, stop,_ no _._ ” Alex’s voice gets hard. Thank goodness for Google’s spell checker, because Kara keeps hitting the wrong keys and the click-clacks of her keyboard are piercing. “ _Kara. Because we want the information to be disseminated calmly—_ ”

“ _Calmly?_ ”

“Calmly. _And the chief will be holding a conference later today with all the information the public needs to know. We don’t need anymore panicking._ ”

“Maybe we _need_ to panic,” Kara grinds out, hard disbelief apparent in her tone. A dull slam crackles on the line.

“ _Oh, yeah, because we know how_ well _the panicking went last time._ ”

Her keyboard stills. Her heater’s dull hum is all that cuts through the ensuing silence and Kara stands, pacing to the kitchenette and back with her hands on her face. Alex says nothing more. She can hit a nerve when she really wants to, Alex, and she knows when she’s hit one, too. The silence stretches to half a minute and Alex ventures, “ _Kara,_ ” wearily. Kara’s mouth wakes with a jolt.

“I think I should go home. I need to—I need to help somehow. I can do better when I’m close—”

“ _Why do you sound like you think this is your fault?_ ”

“Because it is, isn’t it?” Kara collapses on the chair and snatches off her glasses, throwing it at her laptop. Neither the screen nor her glasses break. She’d feel better if one of them did. “I–I gave someone the idea somehow to do something _worse_ to these people. Was it Cadmus? I don’t know. Morgan Edge said—”

“ _Morgan Edge is a vain, know-it-all bastard who_ doesn’t _know it all and should really stop doing his own PR. This is not your fault._ ”

“What if it is?” Alex sighs and Kara shuts her eyes. “I’m going home. I’m checking out right now—”

“ _You will do no such thing._ ”

Kara’s bark of laughter is toxic. “You’ve literally been telling me to come home for days!”

“ _That was before I knew you think this whole other thing is your fault,_ ” Alex seethes. Another dull slam and Kara actually feels like she might cry. “ _If anything this is the best damn time for you to stay away because honestly, Kara, you don’t need anymore of that kind of attention. Some tragic, emotional hero that could end up making things worse._ ”

The hum of the heater again. Kara’s breaths turn shallow and she throws her head back, closes her eyes, counts to ten and then back in two cycles. She listens to her pulse. She listens to Alex speak again, her sister a lot calmer with apparent effort. “ _The chief has requested help from the feds. They’re expected to come anytime within the next—shit._ ”

“What?” Kara asks slowly. Alex curses more on the line and a series of banging and thudding sounds fire from the speakers. Kara sits straighter now. She clutches her phone and demands, “Alex.”

“ _It’s another protest—_ fuck _—Vasquez, get the fuck out here now! Jesus, don’t–don’t wave your goddamn gun around—_ ”

“Alex!”

“ _There are people outside the station. Kara, I have to go._ ”

“Please be caref—”

The line goes dead. On her laptop, a notification pops up that says _siobhansmythe.catco is now live on Periscope_ and Kara closes every tab and every Safari window. She turns the TV off and disconnects from the Wi-Fi. That, she doesn’t want to watch.

 

 

Imra is waiting with two plates of the lunch special at the check-in booth. The way she has them set up and the easy smile she’s wearing warms Kara through the rain on the window and the icy jab of the phone in her hand, held in a deathgrip. When she approaches, Imra tilts her head and hands over utensils. Their fingers brush.

“Fish?”

“Salmon,” Imra confirms. “And creamed spinach. You might find it off-putting since it’s leafy and green, but trust me when I say it’s good, just try it.”

Kara, while she does trust Imra, starts with the salmon first. Utensils clink. Imra has a book out and it’s not opened to anything (Paul Valery, _The Art of Poetry_ ) and Kara can feel her watching even with her head down. She has a feeling about what’s coming.

“I saw the news.” And she’s right.

“Which one?”

“What?”

Kara looks up with a wry smile and a dry laugh. “Which one? There are two big ones already. The bodies and the riot,” she holds up two fingers to emphasize, “and it’s only lunch time.” Imra’s lips purse. Kara swallows and clears her throat, looking down at her food again. “So, yeah. Which?”

“It’s a demonstration, not a riot,” Imra says. Kara’s laugh is low, bland. “And I just saw it online. I don’t think local’s gotten a handle on that one yet.”

Kara grinds her teeth. She forces her mouthful of spinach down and looks at Imra again. Imra is staring at her with something soft in her eyes and Kara couldn’t help it—Kara’s lip wobbles and she averts her eyes. “I didn’t follow the demonstration.”

Imra frowns. “Come around here,” she says. Kara is set to argue but Imra’s gaze turns imploring, and she’s walking into the booth with her plate and every declination on her tongue wilting away. Imra fetches her a stool from the back room. They eat side to side, brushing arms and elbows, and Kara thanks the heavens for Imra, who knows to give the gift of silence.

 

 

“I’ve… sort of, never been good at thinking things through,” Kara says. She sighs, leans forward to rest her forehead on the steering wheel. “I’ve always been more, think with your gut, y’know? And plan on your feet. Better than being too slow.”

“You do seem to be the type to be vested in heroics.”

“What?” Kara guffaws.

“Kara Danvers, investigative reporter, righteous personal beliefs,” Imra quips. Kara flushes and scoffs. “Defender of justice, fighter for inclusion.”

“I’m pretty sure no media outlet has said those about me.”

“Not explicitly, but they’re implied,” Imra says with a raised finger. She turns the radio down and Kara feels if she could dim the sound of the rain outside the car, she’d do that too. “You’re a good person, that’s for sure.”

Kara smirks. “But?”

Imra smirks back. “There’s a certain pace required for some things… things that affect a grander scale. You weren’t just warning five or ten people when you put up that article. You were addressing thousands. And _thousands_ and _fear_ don’t mix very well.”

“I didn’t think they’d take it like that.”

“You thought they’d take it like you did. Which was a pretty unfair assumption. They’re…” Imra waves in some vague gesture. “They’re… _targets_. Try to imagine how that feels for them.”

The rain outside carries on. Kara turns on the wipers so they could at least see the lighthouse. The shape of it on the windshield is blurred, smudged, wet, and still the sight of it is calming. There are no stars though, only rain, and only Imra next to her and the low hum of the radio. Kara breathes. She flexes her hands on the steering wheel and imagines reaching out to the sea to be consumed. “I shouldn’t have tried to… _help_ , I guess.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Imra says pensively. “Imagine—if you didn’t put up the article, people would’ve stayed clueless. There’s no safety in ignorance.”

“But I did put it up, so things went to hell instead.”

“You made a choice,” Imra says softly. She looks at Kara to smile and her hand is between them, reaching for Kara’s with an open palm. Kara takes it. “Which is… better than not doing anything. It’s all a matter of subjectivity.”

“Subjectivity,” Kara parrots. Imra chuckles and pulls Kara’s hand toward her, running her thumb in concentric circles on the knuckles. She’s warm: Kara feels her warmth.

“ _Subjectivity_ ,” Imra looks at her sidelong, “ _grays._ Hard to tell if it’s right or wrong. A lot of things are, right? Gray.”

“What about your marriage, is that gray too?”

Imra doesn’t even pause to consider it. “Not at all.”

“And this?”

Here, Imra pauses. Kara swallows when Imra lifts her eyes to meet hers. The rain persists. On the radio someone is singing _how does it feel to have me thinking about you?_ and Imra reaches out to hold Kara’s cheek. Her palm is rough and her eyes look strangely afraid, strangely doubtful, and Kara doesn’t know what to think. “This,” is all Imra says. She pulls Kara in for a kiss.

* * *

 

Kara could count the number of serious relationships she’s had with one hand and she’d end up with three fingers free. Flings, she couldn’t remember every single one, but she knows a single hand is enough for that too. So she knows them: the flavors of both. The warmth and comfort of a stable companionship, the mercurial excitement of flings, one night stands, two-time things.

She went to sleep with Leslie every night fully soothed by the thought of waking up next to her in the morning, the room silver with dawn and Leslie’s bare leg tangled around her thigh. She flirted with a boy with nice eyes, a girl with a long, elegant neck, other people, and let herself be taken out for dates and drives with no expectations served on the table or sitting with them on the backseat. She kissed them, slept with them, and would just shrug with no question if they ever texted _sorry, can we reschedule lunch?_

This thing with Imra skirts the terrible line between both flavors, sitting heavy at the back of Kara’s tongue like something strange and she couldn’t swallow. Kara doesn’t know if asking _where were you last night, what were you doing_ is as acceptable as holding hands and biting Imra’s lip. She sleeps at night unsure if Imra will be around at check-in in the morning, and wakes up wondering where this thing will take them this time.

Today it’s in the stockroom, surrounded by shelves of condiments and produce where they’ve taken a break from restocking beer. This week’s payment is still crammed in Kara’s back pocket. The place smells like nothing a place two people making out should smell but Imra’s hand crawls up her arm, and Kara forgets the mustard bottles behind her head.

“Can you be quiet?” Imra had asked, and Kara’s breath caught in her chest. She nodded.

They left the freezer door gaping and the hum of it joins the sound of wet lips and shuffling feet. Kara’s hands are on Imra’s hips and her fingers toy with the hems of her blouse. She wants to ruck it so far up she’ll feel the valleys of Imra’s ribs, the curves of her breasts, the skin-bare pounding of her heartbeat. She wants Imra to trace her nails down her arm and mark it.

Imra pushes too hard and Kara slips, an undignified yelp breaking their mouths apart. She catches herself on a shelf and condiments wiggle and wobble dangerously. Imra’s eyes are wide blinking searchlights. Her arms have wound around Kara’s waist to catch her.

And they laugh, quietly, _quietly_. Imra links their hands and cards her fingers through Kara’s hair, tucking a stray lock behind her ear. She smiles at Kara all tender and nips at Kara’s lip, just once. Kara responds with a full kiss. She feels Imra’s chest vibrate with laughter. Imra’s sigh and the smell of the stockroom—it’s all so intimate, and still so casual. Kara doesn’t know what to think.

She wonders, sometimes, what the other people of the inn think when they see them together at check-in. Always, what Mike thinks when his eyes lock on them as he slinks into the booth to shed his apron and wipe off his sweat. Brainy looks but he never lingers, and Kara tries to imagine what he’s seeing when he casually steps out to let them be alone.

“You were right, it was a demonstration,” Kara says. “Alex told me no one was hurt. Or arrested. Lots of yelling, though.”

Imra hums. She’s by the dresser again, looking at picture frames and picking one up once in a while to inspect. Ruby’s purple frame is in her hand: the picture’s that of Alex, Sam, and Ruby from last Christmas, all decked out in the Christmas sweaters Patricia made for them. Both women were gleefully wine drunk, and it shows.

“And there were three bodies.” Kara speaks because it’s. Awkward. Being idle. Just watching Imra go about inspecting her room and her things. She fidgets and bounces a few times, seated at the foot of the bed, hands linked between her knees. Imra shrugs a shoulder.

“I saw the press conference. It was quite the coverage. It was pinned as another possible gang-related activity.”

“ _Mugging,_ ” Kara scoffs. And then she squints. “Why are you smiling?”

Imra puts down the frame and crosses her arms, looking at the whole of the picture collection atop the dresser. Face alight like someone who’s been assembling a puzzle and has found the last, missing pieces under the carpets. She reaches for them with careful fingers, a curious smile: “you know, I wondered before why you and your sister didn’t look anything alike. I thought at first you were stepsisters.”

Kara rubs her hands together. Knowingly, her eyes dart to the picture of Jeremiah and Eliza, younger and in each other’s arms. There’s another picture taken on the same day as that, displayed in Alex’s apartment. All four of them a year after Kara became a part of their family. “Yeah.” She swallows. “Alex didn’t like me much at first. She wanted a dog.”

Imra moves to sit beside Kara. Her hair is damp, and when Kara sniffs she smells oranges and plumerias, like clean laundry and soap. She edges closer.“Tell me how that happened?” Imra prods. 

Dreams. Kara has always tried to imagine how that might’ve looked like. A plane wrapped in hellfire that became a part of the sea, orange to darkness, a new angle of seeing it every time she closed her eyes. “Plane crash. They were on their way home.” She flashes Imra a sad smile. “I was supposed to be up there with them.

“They were visiting family out of the country. I couldn’t go because I had measles.” A shallow, quiet laugh. “My cousin was house-sitting with me—I was thirteen. He was the one who had to tell me and I…” Her eyebrows screw, her face pinches. It takes a second for her to realize Imra’s held her hand and she squeezes it for breath. “That part is… blank to me. I couldn’t remember. I think I blacked out.”

Imra nods. “And your adoptive family?”

“Clark—Kal. My cousin. Took care of everything. He knew them and trusted them, so… he let them take me in. He visited a ton of times, though. He was all I had.” She looks at Imra and wets her lips, breathes more. “I’m. We aren’t from here. So you can understand why—why I feel the way I do about what’s happening at Seattle. Whoever’s doing it is doing it just because those people aren’t from here.”

“I get it.” Imra squeezes her hand and smiles and it’s small, but she traces her thumbnail on the top of Kara’s hand in a soothing pattern. It’s more than enough. “Thank you for telling me.”

Kara nods and Imra releases her hand, clasping hers together as she lolls forward to look at the dresser again. She sits as she always sits. Knees together, hands on her lap, back straight. Kara thinks of her as a child again: well-mannered and brows damp with sweat, the skin of her hands battered rough. She thinks to ask about that. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Your home. Family.”

A length of muscle skirting Imra’s jaw spasms for a moment and Kara is prepared to take the question back, but—“my parents are still in Liverpool,” Imra says. “I haven’t gone to see them in quite some time. Some…” she pauses, chews her lip in thought, “five or six years now, I think. I call, though.”

“Why’d you leave? Like… why’d you come here? You were in Portland first, right?”

“I was. I was working as an illustrator for an advertising agency. It wasn’t glamorous, but it helped keep me here.” She takes a moment to think, it looks like to Kara. Her eyes narrow a tad and her lips get tight. When she speaks again, her tone is somber. “I had a sister. We were… very close. My parents, they’re good people and I love them but. My sister—it was different with her. I took care of her.”

It’s Kara’s turn to reach out. Her fingers brush Imra’s wrist and Imra extends her hand to be held easily. She doesn’t look at Kara, though. “What happened to her?”

“She was born weak. Her heart.” Imra fingers her chest as she says it. Her face scrunches, as she touches it. “We weren’t the wealthiest family, you see, but my parents still did what they could. I pitched in too, finished college purely on scholarships and did some work on the side but… well, what was bound to happen happened in the end.

“I was angry for a while. It’s irrational, I know, to be upset at my parents for something they couldn’t control but…” Imra sighs. “I went away, applied for a visa overseas and took the first job that was thrown at me. I was _so_ angry and now I’m just… sad, I think.”

Kara watches Imra’s lashes flutter. She’s a chest opening slow and Kara, Kara’s there to see it all. This is the kind of thing that makes you wonder if there’s any meaning. It makes Kara wonder who else knows this about Imra, who cares enough to ask about it. “It happens,” she murmurs. “Anger. It’s… how we protect ourselves. From the pain.”

“Doesn’t sound like a very healthy way of coping.”

“Never said it is.” Kara smiles cheekily. “Just. It happens. Have you apologized to them?” Imra looks to Kara and blinks, and Kara only nods her head. “You should.”

“I know.” A moment’s pause. A moment for Kara to give another squeeze, and a moment for Imra to smile and breathe. “I will.”

“So how does Mike fit into this whole thing?”

Imra laughs under her breath and her expression looks almost fond, for a second. “He was a bartender at this bar my co-workers and I frequented. It was just a block from my apartment—I used to sneak Brainy in there for a pint or two.” She laughs again and Kara grins, enjoying the image of a scrawny Brainy being smuggled into a bar for a drink. It’s a funny image: a straight-faced teenager in a bar with adults, textbooks at home, head down, fingers wound tight around his pint. “He was nice. Mike. Funny. Charming. All my friends were in love with him and he picked me, for whatever reason.

“Hardly matters, though. He went on picking whoever he wanted anyway.” Imra shrugs and frowns, but for just a moment. She’d been laughing just earlier and Kara wants to see the roller coaster of her mind. “I hoped marriage would be the push he needed to change but… Well. I ended up here, a glorified handmaid. Can’t say that went well.”

“Why did you two come here anyway?”

“It was his idea of starting anew. Leaving everything we had and were behind. And _me,_ I hoped again.” Imra sighs and throws herself back, lying down, sighing at the ceiling. Sheets crumple underneath her. She’s amber in the light of the room and her lashes sparkle gold for a moment when she closes her eyes.

And Kara, Kara joins her. She crawls on top of Imra and brushes Imra’s hair from her face, skirting her fingertips on the line of Imra’s jaw. Imra’s eyes open and crinkle, and she reaches up to pluck Kara’s glasses away. “I used to draw for my sister,” she whispers. Kara lowers herself a little more and Imra nuzzles her cheek, the corner of her mouth. “I drew for us. I made things _fly,_ ” a laugh, “she asked for flying toasters and houses that could float and we’d laugh about it. I painted her, once.”

“Paint me,” Kara says, and she feels her breath falter when Imra touches her chin. Imra’s gentle about it: rough fingers, soft caresses. Grinning, Kara continues, “I’d pay you.”

Imra laughs. She’s pink in the face. The shape of her mouth is divine and the lines at her eyes deepen with glee, eyes almost shut. Kara couldn’t laugh even if she wanted to. Her breaths are gone, her breaths belong to Imra who grins and says,“just kiss me.”

It’s wet and warm and slow. Kara slides her hand behind Imra’s head to angle her and their lips slant easier, mouths open, breaths gone. Their tongues touch and Kara feels Imra’s hand fist into the front of her shirt. Kara flattens herself against Imra so wholly she feels they’d start sweating. Her teeth graze Imra’s lip, and then she bites it.

Someone pads along in the hall outside Kara’s door and Imra freezes. There’s no other word for it. Her entire body locks up and Kara stops, gathering enough sense to pull back to stare at her. Imra’s mouth shines moist but the color has already started to drain from her face. Wordlessly, she pushes past Kara to sit up, and Kara lets a moment pass before she follows.

“Sorry,” Imra says quietly, wiping her mouth. She brushes her hair back and straightens her sweater at the hems. There’s a distance between them now. Not too much, but enough that Kara thinks and wonders and has to ask.

“Are you scared?” It’s soft, how she asks it. And when Imra reels back to regard her with wide eyes, she shakes her head and waves her hand: it’s fine, it’s fine. “It’s okay, you know. I mean. I get it. Most people don’t—”

“Kara,” Imra says. Kara means to speak again but her voice gets firmer: “ _Kara_. No. It’s not…”

“Are you ashamed?”

“No.” Imra almost scowls. Her face scrunches to do it, but she falters and she couldn’t look Kara in the eye.

“It’s okay,” Kara says, and she means it but her voice still comes out too quiet. She wipes the wetness from her mouth and looks away. “I mean, I get it. It’s just…” gray. She leaves it hanging. “You should probably go.”

It takes Imra a while, but she does finally stand. Her kiss to Kara’s cheek is light, and hesitant, and apologetic and Kara _doesn’t know_ what to think. It’s only when her door closes and she inhales a great whoop of air that she realizes she’d been holding her breath.

* * *

 

Kara thinks about it, sitting in the restaurant with a glass in her hand and eyes to the ceiling. She thinks about it, though she doesn’t know what exactly she should be thinking. There’s a couple behind her and they hold hands as they talk—they’ve done that, haven’t they? Held hands in the car, at the lighthouse, in the stockroom. Julia serves her up her second glass of scotch and she looks at her phone as she swirls it. Thinks about calling Alex for about five seconds. Alex won’t gloat, necessarily, but she’ll say  _I warned you_ and Kara won’t know if she’s right. 

She doesn’t know what to think. The scotch goes down.

She blames her failure to notice that someone’s followed her up to her room on the nightly glasses of scotch sitting in her stomach. She only realizes it when she’s turned the key and has taken a step inside, and someone’s arm pushes the door open wider.

Even having already seen her so many times, Imra’s presence still has a way of tipping the world sideways for Kara. Especially when it’s unexpected, like right now, with her hair a touch mussed and the collar of her sweater askew like she’d been in bed and for some reason gotten up. Kara twists to regard her, mouth open. Imra only looks at her fingers and picks at them.

“It feels _right_ to me,” she says quietly. Kara’s light is off and the dimmed light of the hallway isn’t enough to shed some clarity on Imra’s face. “But… I often worry what people may think.”

“It’s okay,” Kara says automatically. And it is. She’s been with girls and Alex is gay. She knows for a fact Ruby had to deal with certain things at school and that Alex once grappled with the idea of showing up there and flashing her badge. “I totally get it. I mean, I know why. Don’t worry.”

Imra shakes her head. “I know it’s unfair to you,” she murmurs. “But this is… it’s new to me.”

“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want.”

“I _do_ want… to…” It’s so low a murmur that Kara thinks for a second it’s all air and she inches close, bent to listen, their hands still on the door. Imra finally looks up. She gestures vaguely to the room. To Kara? “Can I…?”

Kara nods dumbly. “Yeah. Yeah, of course.”

She doesn’t know, really, what Imra had been asking or what she agreed to. Maybe Imra asked both and she agreed to both: to her stepping inside the room, to holding Kara by the back of her neck to pull her in.

The door is nudged closed by Kara’s foot. They’re plunged into darkness and Kara’s hands are her eyes, running down the discernible shape of Imra’s waist to her hips. The stutter of Imra’s ribs and the tiny sound that she spills into Kara’s mouth wakes something inside Kara that makes her muscles twitch and her insides warp into a different shape.

Eight paces to the bed. Eight paces to the bed, she knows, past the little closet with all her coats and the duffels she came here with three months before. They punctuate all eight paces with open mouths and wet kisses and they fall to the bed with a bounce. Their mouths crack apart with a great gasp of air and Imra feels for Kara in the dark, hooking her fingers on the underside of her shirt collar.

“We can stop,” Kara says, to which Imra says _no_ and pulls Kara close.

Something inside Kara wants to go at it hard. Hard and keening and ravishing, primal like the beasts the lot of them evolved from. It’s the same something that makes her jam her fingers between her thighs in the shower and come with an open mouth, but Imra is shaking and Kara places that high above everything. She slips her hand under Imra’s sweater and revels in the feeling of Imra’s abdomen caving inward with a long exhale. She feels the gust of breath on her top lip.

She reaches under the bra, brushes the erect nub of nipples with the webbings of her thumb and forefinger. Imra’s chest expands with air and Kara rucks her sweater and bra up, _up_ , until she can move down and take a nipple in her mouth. Imra’s response is to free herself of the damned clothes, flinging them in some direction with a dull thud.

“I want to see you,” Kara says hoarsely when she comes up. “Can I see you?” Imra whispers an affirmative. Kara slants at an angle and flicks the bedside lamp on. Light washes over them in a warm amber, a fiery luminescence that highlights Imra in all the right ways. Her nose, her wet lips, the fine lines of her collarbones. The pretty curves of her breasts and the heady dilation of her pupils. “Tell me if you want me to stop,” Kara says, and deep down she wishes Imra won’t want her to.

It’s with twitching fingers that Imra undoes Kara’s shirt and tosses it aside. Kara’s bra is unhooked with her mouth on the underside of Imra’s jaw, leaving sloppy kisses with a lot of tongue. There’s a fire in her pelvis that doesn’t want to be put out. She asks Imra quietly. Imra nods—they get each other’s pants off and what Kara feels on the flat of her thigh when she presses it up to Imra’s crotch is a warm moistness that makes her groan.

She isn’t any better. Her own underwear’s ruined beyond comprehension. The urge to do herself in right here, right now is so strong that the thought to excuse herself to head to the bathroom pops into her mind briefly. Imra’s mouth is on the jut of her jaw, just below her ear. Kara pads her hand down between them and pushes Imra’s underwear aside to delve with her fingertips.

Imra stiffens. Her nails dig into Kara’s biceps. Kara starts and means to pull away but Imra closes her legs tight around her hand. “No,” she croaks, and how raspy her voice soundsmakes Kara’s brain fritz. “ _No_ ,” with want, “no, it’s alright, _please_.”

Imra’s underwear goes and gets stuck on an ankle but that’s information that registers to Kara only in passing. With single-minded focus, she flattens her palm on Imra’s cunt and smears upward, and Imra’s body paints a beautiful arch.

Kara enters with a finger, slow: two when Imra makes a tiny needy sound and squeezes her elbow. Kara goes down to mouth at a nipple and asks with her chin between Imra’s breasts, “are you okay?” Imra whispers yes. Kara asks again, “can I?”

Imra cants her head to look down at Kara. Her eyes are hooded. She’s crimson from her forehead to her clavicles. “With my mouth,” Kara clarifies, and she swears Imra’s whole body twitches and tightens and Imra nods so vigorously with her eyes closed.

Coarse hairs tickle Kara’s nose and then get sucked into her mouth. The sound Imra makes is so unholy it’s holy. She flattens her mouth on Imra’s clit and drags it in firm circles, swirling shapes, pressing the tips of her fingers upward again and again on the ridges inside Imra. On either side of her face Imra’s thighs shudder, and when Kara closes her mouth  to suck on her clit she feels Imra’s nails on her scalp, thighs closing in on her head.

Kara’s underwear is close to drenched. It’s faintly sticky when she rubs her thighs together and she squeezes her legs shut, stars begging to explode in her stomach and lower. She hooks her fingers into a harsh curl inside Imra. Imra’s hips buck high and her clit inadvertently grinds against Kara’s teeth. She _sobs._ She begs, “no, _no,_ ” and gasps, “not in your—no, _Kara_ —”

Kara detaches her mouth. A splurge of wetness touches her chin just so and spills into her hand, between her fingers. Imra moans her name and the sound descends into unintelligible mewling and little puffs of air that make Kara’s head spin. Imra’s body is pulled taut, racked with tremors and labored breathing that Kara helps her get through with hard presses and kisses on her hip. Once Imra has slumped, Kara’s own arousal floods the forefront of her thinking like an angry vengeance. She’s panting. She mounts Imra’s thigh and shoves her hand into her underwear, forehead on Imra’s shoulder.

She claws at the pillow and the spread of Imra’s hair. She’s rocking her hips and Imra lifts her thigh to help with friction. And then she reaches down to grasp Kara’s wrist. “Let me,” she says, voice like her hands, rough but soft in all the right places: fingertips through sand. Kara slides her underwear off and it’s the feeling of her complete wetness that makes Imra’s mouth fall open, eyes wide, dark, blown. They kiss, huffing and open-mouthed. Kara keens.

That’s the thing about doing it with girls, though. Girls know what girls want and while Imra is clumsy and shy and inexperienced, her fingers know what to do. She knows what to give. She reaches past Kara’s hairs and slides her fingers inside with so much ease it’s almost embarrassing.

Kara’s hips won’t stop moving, humping to relieve even just some of the pressure. Her face is pressed to Imra’s shoulder and Imra’s thigh bounces with her rhythm, fingers deep in her cunt and thumb grinding firm ups and downs on her clit. She doesn’t last very long—she was done for the moment Imra said yes to her mouth. “You can be loud,” Imra whispers to her. Kara chokes. She buries her face into the curve of Imra’s neck and shoulder and moans, long and muffled. Somewhere in the sound is Imra’s name, said like a prayer, a mantra, not just once, and Imra whimpers against her temple.

The sheets are cheap. They’re rough, and they chafe, but Imra more than makes up for them with the soft caress of her hands on Kara’s thigh, on the small of her back. “Kara,” she rasps.

“Imra,” Kara breathes, once she _can_ breathe. There’s a twitching in her legs that feel like bone-deep tickles. She holds Imra’s shoulder. “Do you feel okay?”

She looks at Imra. There’s something like wonder on Imra’s face, cheeks red, sweat dotting her forehead and nose. She’s looking at Kara like she’s about to reach for spun gold. She nods. Kara’s heart is throwing itself raw against her ribcage and for a while, it’s all Kara hears. Her own blood rushing in her ears.

It’s calm when the heat between them passes. It’s quiet but not awkward, no: it’s the comforting quiet after a huge storm. They’re on their sides to fit on the bed and Imra’s leg is thrown over Kara’s hip. Kara’s nose is touching the scoop between Imra’s collarbones. Imra smells like sweat. Like sex. And then a faint undertone of just _Imra._ A moment ago they’d laughed into each other’s skins, bashful. A moment ago they’d kissed.

“Wake me when you do tomorrow?” Imra whispers against the crown of her head. Kara nods. And that’s the key to seeing colors—it’s beyond knowing Imra has two moles on the right side of her chest and three in a triangle on her belly. Beyond knowing how it feels to run her fingers on the stretch marks on Imra’s hips, her thighs. More, definitely, than sloppy kisses on a timer. It’s knowing for sure what will happen in the morning, to know what to expect when you wake. It’s the dawn light surrounding Imra’s shape like a halo.

Kara throws the blanket over them both and Imra lifts up a second to turn off the light. In Kara’s arms she’s warm, undulating with deep breathing. Kara pads her fingertips on the bumps of Imra’s spine. She wants, for once, to sleep in.

**Author's Note:**

> [also on tumblr.](https://m-arahuyo.tumblr.com/tagged/caoe-fic) :')


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